Climate change is one of the greatest market failures of our time. This thesis consists of three essays in which we study the economics of climate change using networks as a theoretical framework. In the first essay, we discover flaws in the foundations of a recent strand of literature...

Die Video-Plattform Youtube ist eine der meistbesuchten Webseiten weltweit. Youtube-Stars erreichen mit ihren Videos große Zuschauergruppen und können als Multiplikatoren für Werbebotschaften dienen. Sie sind oftmals Meinungsführer, denen hohes Vertrauen entgegengebracht wird, weshalb sie...

Does the Internet undermine social capital or facilitate inter-personal and civic engagement in the real world? Merging unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individual-level data, we investigate how broadband Internet affects several dimensions of social capital. One...

The ability to accurately estimate the extent to which the failure of a bank disrupts the financial system is very valuable for regulators of the financial system. One important part of the financial system is the interbank payment system. This paper develops a robust measure, SinkRank, that...

Social interactions determine many economic behaviors, but information on social ties does not exist in most publicly available and widely used datasets. We present results on the identification of social networks from observational panel data that contains no information on social ties between...

We introduce "group cohesion" to study the economic relevance of social relationships in team production. We operationalize measurement of group cohesion, adapting the "oneness scale" from psychology. A series of experiments, including a pre-registered replication, reveals strong positive...

This paper studies how social relationships between managers and employees affect relational incentive contracts. To this end we develop a simple dynamic principal-agent model where both players may have feelings of altruism or spite toward each other. The contract may contain two types of...