A large body of recent research argues that social, or non-market, interactions can explain a wide range of puzzling phenomena from fashion cycles to stock market crashes. This paper attempts to connect the range of these papers with a general model and a broad empirical overview. We establish...

A large body of recent research argues that social, or non-market, interactions can explain a wide range of puzzling phenomena from fashion cycles to stock market crashes. This paper attempts to connect the range of these papers with a general model and a broad empirical overview. We establish...

The high degree of variance of crime rates across space (and across time) is one of the oldest puzzles in the social sciences (see Quetelet (1835)). Our empirical work strongly suggests that this variance is not the result of observed or unobserved geographic attributes. This paper presents a...