Using detailed data on a cohort of young Americans who were in their late twenties and early thirties in 2008, we investigate the importance of forces different from economic incentives in nest-leaving decisions. We apply recent methods from social network econometrics to identify the importance...

Recent studies in psychology and neuroscience find that fictional works exert strong influence on readers and shape their opinions and worldviews. We study the Potterian economy, which we compare to economic models, to assess how Harry Potter books affect economic literacy. We find that some...

Die "Technikakzeptanz" der Bevölkerung ist seit den 70er Jahren immer wieder Gegenstand von Umfragen. Dabei geht es vor allem um kontrovers diskutierte gesellschaftliche Konsequenzen der Kernenergie, der Informations- und Kommunikationstechniken und der Gentechnik. Heute ist es neben der...

This paper explores the following chain of conjectures: rising use of the internet, the widespread access to global information, and intensified communication between regions and countries brought about, for example, by intensified trade links bring about expansion of people's social space and...

This paper studies the effect of social closure on crime and tax evasion rates using disaggregated data for Italian municipalities. It measures the degree of social openness of a community by the diversity of its surname distribution, which reflects the history of migration and inbreeding. It...

This paper explores the following chain of conjectures: rising use of the internet, the widespread access to global information, and intensified communication between regions and countries brought about, for example, by intensified trade links bring about expansion of people's social space and...

Das Paper gibt einen Überblick über das Leben und die Bedeutung von Walter Lippmann, der in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts einer der bedeutendsten Journalisten der USA war. Lippmann hat sich auch an Propagandaaktivitäten im Ersten Weltkrieg beteiligt und aufgrund dieser Erfahrung...

In the aftermath of recent populist upheavals in Europe, the U.S., the UK and other areas around the world, nationalist economic policies challenge the overly positive view on economic integration and the reduction of trade barriers established by standard economic theory. For quite a long time...

This paper studies whether conformism behavior affects individual outcomes in crime. We present a social network model of peer effects with ex-ante heterogeneous agents and show how conformism and deterrence affect criminal activities. We then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed...

We survey the literature on social networks by putting together the economics, sociological and physics/applied mathematics approaches, showing their similarities and differences. We expose, in particular, the two main ways of modeling network formation. While the physics/applied mathematics...