Objectives To evaluate whether happiness can spread from person to person and whether niches of happiness form within social networks. Design Longitudinal social network analysis. Setting Framingham Heart Study social network. Participants 4739 individuals followed from 1983 to 2003. Main...

We recently showed that obesity can spread socially from person to person in adults (Christakis and Fowler 2007). A natural question to ask is whether or not these results generalize to a population of adolescents. Three separate teams of researchers have analyzed the National Longitudinal Study...

Background: The prevalence of obesity has increased substantially over the past 30 years. We quantitatively explored the nature and extent of person-to-person spread of obesity as a possible contributing factor explaining this increase. Methods: We developed a densely interconnected social...

Past research suggests that spouses influence one another to vote, but relies almost exclusively on correlation in turnout. It is therefore difficult to establish whether spouses mobilize each other or tend to marry similar others. Here, we test the dependency hypothesis by examining voting...

Poor sanitation, including the lack of clean functioning toilets, is a major factor contributing to morbidity and mortality from infectious diseases in the developing world. We examine correlates of latrine ownership in rural India with a focus on social network predictors. Participants from 75...

Twin and adoption studies have consistently found that genetic variation is an important source of heterogeneity in economic outcomes such as educational attainment and income. The advent of inexpensive, genome-wide scans is now making it increasingly feasible to directly examine specific...

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...

We explore the influence of genetic variation on subjective well-being by employing a twin design and genetic association study. In a nationally-representative twin sample, we first show that about 33% of the variation in life satisfaction is explained by genetic variation. Although previous...

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...