The important role of friends, neighbors and colleagues in shaping individual choices has been brought out in a number of studies over the years. The presence of significant 'local' influence in shaping individual behavior suggests that firms, governments and developmental agencies should...

This paper studies network formation in settings where players are heterogeneous with respect to benefits as well as the costs of forming links. Our results demonstrate that centrality, center-sponsorship and short network diameter are robust features of equilibrium networks. We find that in a...

Financial linkages smooth the shocks faced by individual components of the system, but they also create a wedge between ownership and decision-making. The classical intuition on the role of pooling risk in raising welfare is valid when ownership is evenly dispersed. However, when the ownership...