The aim of this paper is to provide a new mechanism for the spatial mismatch hypothesis. Spatial mismatch can here be the result of optimizing behavior on the part of the labor market participants. In particular, the unemployed can choose low amounts of search and long-term unemployment if they...

City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across many countries. One popular explanation for such power-law regularities is in terms of random growth processes, where power laws arise asymptotically from the assumption of iid growth rates among all cities within a...

How do disruptive peers shape academic and career paths? We examine this question by leveraging the random assignment of students to classrooms in Greece and identifying the effects of peer disruptiveness on academic performance and career paths. Using suspension hours as a measure of...

How do disruptive peers shape academic and career paths? We examine this question by leveraging the random assignment of students to classrooms in Greece and identifying the effects of peer disruptiveness on academic performance and career paths. Using suspension hours as a measure of...

This paper studies how the strength of social ties are affected by the geographical location of other individuals and their social capital. We characterize the equilibrium in terms of both social interactions and social capital. We show that lower travel costs increase not only the interaction...

We investigate whether COVID-19 deaths that occurred before vaccination rollouts impact subsequent vaccination take-up. We use data on local vaccination rates and COVID-19-related deaths from England measured at high geographic granularity. We find that vaccination take-up as of November 2021 is...

In settings where resistance and rampant misinformation against vaccines exist, the prospect of containing infectious diseases remains a challenge. Can delivery of information regarding the benefits of vaccination through personal home visits by local ambassadors increase vaccine uptake? We...

There is substantial empirical evidence showing that peer effects matter in many activities. The workhorse model in empirical work on peer effects is the linear-in-means (LIM) model, whereby it is assumed that agents are linearly affected by the mean action of their peers. We develop a new...

We study how social interaction and friendship shape students' political opinions in a natural experiment at Sciences Po, the cradle of top French politicians. Quasi-random assignments of students into the same short-term integration groups before their scholar curriculum reduce political...

We study the impact of job proximity on individual employment and earnings. The analysis exploits a Swedish refugee dispersal policy to get exogenous variation in individual locations. Using very detailed data on the exact location of all residences and workplaces in Sweden, we find that having...