Existing evidence shows that decision-makers’ social ties to internal co-workers can lead to reduced firm performance. In this paper, we show that decision-makers’ social ties to external transaction partners can also hurt firm performance. Specifically, we use 34 years of data from the...

We introduce agency concerns to social capital theory and predict that managers can use individual social capital to reduce personal effort costs, which is not in the best interest of the firm. To test this prediction, we collect data on all 8,019 hiring decisions from general managers in the...

Existing evidence shows that decision makers’ social ties to internal co-workers can lead to reduced firm performance. In this article, we show that decision makers’ social ties to external transaction partners can also hurt firm performance. Specifically, we use 34 years of data from the...

This paper discusses how the mechanisms that allocate workers to tasks vary systematically with isolation from markets and hence with distance from urban centers. This in turn affects social norms, household structure, and the perceived benefits of migration. The relevance of the framework is...