We survey the literatures on the economic consequences of the structure of social networks. We develop a taxonomy of 'macro' and 'micro' characteristics of social inter-action networks and discuss both the theoretical and empirical findings concerning the role of those characteristics in...

We examine how participation in a microfinance program diffuses through social networks. We collected detailed demographic and social network data in 43 villages in South India before microfinance was introduced in those villages and then tracked eventual participation. We exploit exogenous...

Delinquents are embedded in a network of relationships. Social ties among delinquents are modelled by means of a graph where delinquents compete for a booty and benefit from local interactions with their neighbors. Each delinquent decides in a non-cooperative way how much delinquency effort he...

Finite population non-cooperative games with linear-quadratic utilities, where each player decides how much action she exerts, can be interpreted as a network game with local payoff complementarities, together with a globally uniform payoff substitutability component and an own concavity effect....

In this paper, we investigate the impact of peers on own outcomes where all agents embedded in a network choose more than one activity. We develop a simple network model that illustrates these issues. We differentiate between the ‘seemingly unrelated’ simultaneous equations model where...

In this chapter, we provide an overview of research on neighborhoods and social networks and their role in shaping behavior and economic outcomes. We include discussion of empirical and theoretical analyses of the role of neighborhoods and social networks in crime, education and labor-market...

We develop an unified model embedding different behavioral mechanisms of social interactions and design a statistical model selection test to discriminate between them in empirical applications. This framework is applied to study peer effects in education and delinquent behavior for adolescents...

We develop a network model looking at the role of different types of peers in education. The empirical salience of the model is tested using a very detailed longitudinal dataset of adolescent friendship networks. We find that there are strong and persistent peer effects in education but peers...

The aim of this paper is to investigate and understand the effect of high-school friends on years of schooling. We develop a simple network model where students first choose their friends and then decide how much effort they put in education. The empirical salience of the model is tested using...