The aim of this paper is to provide a new mechanism based on social interactions explaining why distance to jobs can have a negative impact on workers' labor-market outcomes, especially ethnic minorities. Building on Granovetter's idea that weak ties are superior to strong ties for providing...

Where a community or group is socially excluded from a dominant group, some individuals of that group may identify with the dominant culture and others may reject that culture. The aim of this paper is to investigate this issue by empirically analyzing the potential trade-off for ethnic...

We investigate the racial gap in test scores between black and white students in Britain both in levels and differences across the school years. We find that there is an increasing racial gap in test scores between ages 7 and 11, and a decreasing one between ages 11 and 16. Using the richness of...

We consider a model where each individual (or ethnic minority) is embedded in a network of relation-ships and decides whether or not she wants to be assimilated to the majority norm. Each individual wants her behavior to agree with her personal ideal action or norm but also wants her behavior to...

We investigate the sources of differences in school performance between students of different races by focusing on identity issues. We find that having a higher percentage of same-race friends has a positive effect of white teenagers' test score while having a negative effect on blacks' test...

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...