The quality of one's social network significantly affects his economic success. Even after the skill acquisition period, the social network influences economic success through various routes such as mentoring, job searching, business connections, or information channeling. In this paper I...

Many countries encourage universities to increase the ethnic and socio-economic diversity of their student bodies, for example, through affirmative action policies. We use unique administrative data for all undergraduate degree students entering English universities between 2008 and 2010 to...

Same-type teachers are extolled as a way to improve learning outcomes of socially disadvantaged students. This paper uses a relatively understudied social characteristic, caste, to study whether same-type teachers improve learning in a low-income country. Rich longitudinal data from Pakistan...

With the growing recognition of the role played by geography in all sorts of economicproblems, there is strong interest in measuring the size and scope of local spillovers (i.e.,simple anonymous agglomeration or congestion effects, or more complicated interactions between individuals or firms of...

We present a model of neighborhood effects in wage payment delays. Positive feedback arises because each employer’s arrears affect the late payment costs faced by other firms in the same local labor market, resulting in a strategic complementarity in the practice. The model is estimated on...

Paper for presentation at the Northeastern Agricultural & Resource Economics Association’s Workshop on Economics and Child Nutrition Programs, AAEA & NAREA Joint Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 23, 2011.

With the growing recognition of the role played by geography in all sorts of economic problems, there is strong interest in measuring the size and scope of local spillovers (i.e., simple anonymous agglomeration or congestion effects, or more complicated interactions between individuals or firms...

A central feature of many models of location choice – whether of firms or households, within or across cities – is the role of local interactions or spillovers, whereby the payoffs from choosing a location depend in part on the number or attributes of other individuals or firms that choose the...

We study cost-sharing rules in network problems where agents seek to ship quantities of some good to their respective locations, and the cost on each arc is linear in the flow crossing it. In this context, Core Selection requires that each subgroup of agents pay a joint cost share that is not...