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...

We analyze the intergenerational transmission of the strength of religion focusing on the interplay between family and peer effects. We develop a theoretical model suggesting that both peer quality and parental effort are of importance for the religious behavior of the children. We then bring...

This paper studies how the strength of social ties are affected by the geographical location of other individuals and their social capital. We characterize the equilibrium in terms of both social interactions and social capital. We show that lower travel costs increase not only the interaction...

Using novel information from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the period 1996-2011, we document that migrants with a German friend are more similar to natives than those without a local companion along several important dimensions, including engagement in social activities, concerns about the...

We propose a theoretical framework to study the determinants of ethnic and religious identity along two distinct motivational processes which have been proposed in the social sciences: cultural conformity and cultural distinction. Under cultural conformity, ethnic identity is reduced by...

We analyse the effect of strong and weak ties on the individual probability of finding a job. Using the dynamic model of Calvó-Armengol and Jackson (2004), two results are put forward: (i) the individual probability of finding a job is increasing in the number of strong and weak ties; (ii) the...

This paper studies whether structural properties of friendship networks affect individual outcomes in education. We first develop a model that shows that, at the Nash equilibrium, the outcome of each individual embedded in a network is proportional to her Katz-Bonacich centrality measure. This...