The past decade has witnessed a surge of interest in the economic analysis of networks. This chapter is concerned with the role played by labor and credit networks in shaping economic activity in developing countries. The problem of identifying network effects on economic outcomes is first...

Are labor markets in higher-income countries more meritocratic, in the sense that worker-job matching is based on skills rather than idiosyncratic attributes unrelated to productivity? If so, why? And what are the aggregate consequences? Using internationally comparable data on worker skills and...