The aggregate economic impact of any developmental project depends on its effects within the chosen administrative region as well as its economic spillovers into other regions. However, little is known about how these spillovers propagate through geographic, ethnic and road networks. In this...

Although the linear-in-means model is the workhorse model in empirical work on peer effects, its theoretical properties are understudied. In this paper, we investigate how social norms affect individual effort, aggregate effort, and welfare. While individual productivity always positively...

We study a very general contest game in which players exert efforts in multiple battles. The conflict structure, which represents who participates in which battlefield, is arbitrary and can be represented by a hypergraph. We show, under mild conditions on the cost function and contest...

We study the role of social network structure in peer-to-peer educational spillovers by leveraging a two-year field experiment in primary schools in rural Bangladesh. We implement a randomized educational intervention--the provision of free after-school tutoring--offered to a random subsample of...

This paper investigates the pathways through which immigrant communities (social networks) influence individual naturalization. Specifically, we examine the impact that a fraction of naturalized co-ethnics, residing in the same block as a new immigrant in New York City in 1930, have on the...

We show that the intensity of "keeping up with the Joneses" behavior is largely determined by the extent to which a community is socially connected. Using a unique dataset on car purchases in Southern California, we find that social influence intensifies in suburban communities in which...

We develop a model of competing diffusions of goods on a social network. There are two types of goods and individuals: mass-market (more prevalent) and niche-market. We start with a general threshold rule and show that multiple equilibria prevail. Then, when everyone uses a single friend...

We study whether a woman's labor supply as a young adult is shaped by the work behavior of her adolescent peers' mothers. Using detailed information on a sample of U.S. teenagers who are followed over time, we find that labor force participation of high school peers' mothers affects adult...

We propose a theoretical framework to study the determinants of ethnic and religious identity along two distinct motivational processes which have been proposed in the social sciences: cultural conformity and cultural distinction. Under cultural conformity, ethnic identity is reduced by...