This paper studies peer-to-peer (p2p) lending on the Internet.Prosper.com, the first p2p lending website in the US, matches individuallenders and borrowers for unsecured consumer loans. Using transactiondata from June 1, 2006 to July 31, 2008, we examine what informationproblems exist on Prosper...

The authors motivate social capital arguments at the world-system level through the analysis of world-trade flows and nation status, 1965 to 1980, with specific attention to contextual changes in global trade and stratified effects on participation in trade within it. They generate measures of...

In theoretical ecology, simple stochastic models that satisfy two basic conditions about the distribution of niche values and feeding ranges have proved successful in reproducing the overall structural properties of real food webs, using species richness and connectance as the only input...

Mechanisms that enable declining networks to avert structural collapse and performance degradation are not well understood. This knowledge gap reflects a shortage of data on declining networks and an emphasis on models of network growth. Analyzing 700,000 transactions between firms in the New...

This paper reviews the literature on small-world networks in social science and management. This relatively new area of research represents an unusual level of cross-disciplinary research within social science and between social science and the physical sciences. We review the findings of this...

Department: Political Science.

This paper uses international trade data toexamine the effects of climate shocks on economicactivity. At the aggregate level, MelissaDell, Benjamin F. Jones, and Benjamin A.Olken (2008) (hereafter, DJO) have demonstratedthat higher temperatures in a given yearreduce the growth rate of GDP per...