Every firm in a developed economy relies on the mere existence of countless other firms to keep prices competitive up and down all supply chains. Without this network externality, no firm forms; and without many firms, no network forms; locking in a low-income trap. Business group governance...

Do political connections affect firm dynamics, innovation, and creative destruction? We study Italian firms and their workers to answer this question. Our analysis uses a brand-new dataset, spanning the period from 1993 to 2014, where we merge: (i) firm-level balance sheet data; (ii) social...

We study the relationship between ethnicity, occupational choice, and entrepreneurship. Immigrant groups in the United States cluster in specific business sectors. For example, Koreans are 34 times more likely than other immigrants to operate dry cleaners, and Gujarati-speaking Indians are 108...

We demonstrate that personal connections amongst politicians have a significant impact on the voting behavior of U.S. politicians. Networks based on alumni connections between politicians, as well as common seat locations on the chamber floor, are consistent predictors of voting behavior. For...

This paper analyzes statistical issues arising from networks based on non-representative samples of the population. We first characterize the biases in both network statistics and estimates of network effects under non-random sampling theoretically and numerically. Sampled network data...

This paper presents and structurally estimates a model of endogenous network formation and legislative activity of career-motivated politicians. Employing data on socialization and legislative effort of members of the 105th-110th U.S. Congresses, our model reconciles a set of empirical...

Social and economic networks are ubiquitous, serving as contexts for job search, technology diffusion, the accumulation of human capital and even the formulation of norms and values. The systematic empirical study of network formation - the process by which agents form, maintain and dissolve...

We develop a theoretical model of security investments in a network of interconnected agents. Network connections introduce the possibility of cascading failures due to an exogenous or endogenous attack depending on the profile of security investments by the agents. The general presumption in...

We develop and analyze a tractable empirical model for strategic network formation that can be estimated with data from a single network at a single point in time. We model the network formation as a sequential process where in each period a single randomly selected pair of agents has the...