This paper studies the formation of networks among individuals. The focus is on the compatibility of overall societal welfare with individual incentives to form and sever links. The paper reviews and synthesizes some previous results on the subject, and also provides new results on the existence...

Over the past 20 years, finance has become commodified. Firms increasingly obtain finance from securities markets, instead of borrowing from commercial banks with which they have long-term relationships, while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac package a growing number of mortgages into bonds. When...

We provide a matching model where identical workers are embedded in ex- ante identical social networks. Job arrival rate is endogeneous and wages are bargained. We study the evolution of networks with time and characterize the equilibrium distribution of unemployment rates across networks. We...

This paper provides a simple matching model in which unemployed workers and employers in large firms can be matched together through social networks or through more "formal" methods of search. We show that networks do not necessarily add new externalities and that some results previously...

In recent years, understanding the structure and function of complex networks has become the foundation for explaining many different real- world complex social, information, biological and technological phenomena. Techniques from statistical physics have been successfully applied to the...

Interest in social capital has grown as it has become apparent that it is an important predictor of collective well-being. Recently, however, attention has shifted to how levels of social capital have changed over time. But focusing on how a society moves from one level of social capital to...

This paper is the Italian version of “Measuring Social Capital in Italy”, presented at the Third Forum for Young Researchers promoted by the Italian Sociological Association and at the Second Workshop for Young Economists organized by the University of Bologna. The contribution of this paper...

This paper is the Italian version of “Measuring Social Capital in Italy”, presented at the Third Forum for Young Researchers promoted by the Italian Sociological Association and at the Second Workshop for Young Economists organized by the University of Bologna. The contribution of this paper...

Network economics holds the view that individual actions and, in turn aggregate outcomes, are mainly determined by the interaction structure between heterogeneous economic agents. In this paper we study the diffusion of an innovation over a social network. More specifically, we study whether...