Essays In Social Networks And Development Economics
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Essays On Social Networks In Development Economics
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Author : Arun Gautham Chandrasekhar
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2012
Essays On Social Networks In Development Economics written by Arun Gautham Chandrasekhar and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2012 with categories.
(cont.) substitutes for commitment. On net, savings allows individuals to smooth risk that cannot be shared interpersonally, with the largest benefits for those who are weakly connected in the network. The final chapter (co-authored with my classmates Horacio Larreguy and Juan Pablo Xandri) attempts to determine which models of social learning on networks best describe empirical behavior. Theory has focused on two leading models of social learning on networks: Bayesian and DeGroot rules of thumb learning. These models can yield greatly divergent behavior; individuals employing rules of thumb often double-count information and may not exhibit convergent behavior in the long run. By conducting a unique lab experiment in rural Karnataka, India, set up to exactly differentiate between these two models, we test which model best describes social learning processes on networks. We study experiments in which seven individuals are placed into a network, each with full knowledge of its structure. The participants attempt to learn the underlying (binary) state of the world. Individuals receive independent, identically distributed signals about the state in the first period only; thereafter, individuals make guesses about the underlying state of the world and these guesses are transmitted to their neighbors at the beginning of the following round. We consider various environments including incomplete information Bayesian models and provide evidence that individuals are best described by DeGroot models wherein they either take simple majority of opinions in their neighborhood.
Essays In Social Networks And Development Economics
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Author :
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2015
Essays In Social Networks And Development Economics written by and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2015 with categories.
This dissertation is a collection of three essays on social networks and development economics. The first chapter examines the effect of peer networks on self-control problems. I construct a theoretical model to describe the way in which peer networks influence consumption behaviors through social norms, which guide individuals to conform to their friends' behavior. Using comprehensive data from a monthly survey conducted in 16 villages in Thailand from 1999 through 2004, I empirically examine peer effects on temptation consumption patterns, and test the mechanism underlying this relationship. Detailed social network information in the dataset allows the identification of impacts using a friend of a friend (excluded network) as the instrument. The empirical results provide evidence that peer decisions significantly impact individuals' temptation consumption such as alcohol and gambling, as well as savings. These peer effects are driven primarily by social norms, rather than by risk sharing. In the second chapter, co-authored with professor Laura Schechter, we first conduct an extensive review of the disparate literature studying the stability of preferences measured in experiments. Then, we test the stability of individuals' choices in panel data from rural Paraguay, including both experimental and survey measures of risk, time, and social preferences collected over almost a decade. Answers to survey questions are quite stable, while experimental measures are less so. If choices made in experiments are not stable, it may be because these choices are influenced by shocks, or because they include high levels of noise. We find no evidence that real-world shocks influence play in games. We suggest that in a developing country context, researchers may want to design simpler experiments or make more use of survey questions to measure preferences. The third chapter explores the impact of weather shocks on farmers' income diversification strategies. I combine historical weather data with household data in India to explore whether farmers employ different responses toward weather shocks in regions with different levels of historical variation. I find that weather shocks can negatively affect agricultural income, but this effect decreases in a riskier place where people have, over time, diversified their income into off-farm employment. I also find evidence that caste-networks can potentially determine people's income diversification strategies. Households who are within a different caste from the majority of their village peers will be more likely to seek for off-farm jobs, while households who are in a similar caste to the majority of the people within the village will seek agricultural wage jobs from others in the village.
Poverty Occupational Choice And Social Networks
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Author : Selim Gulesci
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2011
Poverty Occupational Choice And Social Networks written by Selim Gulesci and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011 with Bangladesh categories.
Three Essays On Social Networks In Economics
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Author : Livia Shkoza
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2022
Three Essays On Social Networks In Economics written by Livia Shkoza and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2022 with categories.
Three Essays In Development Economics
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Author : David Russell Hansen
language : en
Publisher: Stanford University
Release Date : 2011
Three Essays In Development Economics written by David Russell Hansen and has been published by Stanford University this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011 with categories.
This dissertation is composed of three chapters. All three deal with topics in development economics. The first chapter examines the effects on village institutions of introducing formal financial institution options into the village. The second addresses the effects of government policy on educational investment and crime. The third tests the explanatory power of various explanations of the gender gap in math test scores. The first chapter examines the effects of a transition from a ``traditional'' economy based on an uncertain source of income, with risk fully insured away by one's neighbors in a social network through costly network ties, to a ``modern'' economy in which some agents have access to partial insurance at a lower cost. A theoretical model is used to show that village social networks can break down as some members of the village no longer need the insurance the social network provides, producing a reduction in welfare (if the costs of reducing moral hazard are not too high) for at least some individuals and possibly the village as a whole. This loss of welfare can occur even when networks provide other benefits to those belonging to them and is likely to be heterogeneous, depending on the opportunities and networks available to individuals. This paper tests these predictions using Indonesian data to examine the effect of a change in the banking institutions available to a community on the strength of social networks (measured by community participation) and welfare (measured by household expenditure and by child health). The analysis finds that changing financial institution availability in general does not influence community participation or welfare, but that financial institutions that primarily serve certain groups do relatively reduce the welfare of households not in those groups, which is consistent with the hypotheses generated by the model. Crime is an important feature of economic life in many countries, especially in the developing world. Crime distorts many economic decisions because it acts like an unpredictable tax on earnings. In particular, the threat of crime may influence people's willingness to invest in schooling or physical capital. The second chapter explores the questions "What influence do crime rates and levels of investment have on one another?" and "How do government policies affect the relationship between investment and crime?" by creating a simple structural model of crime and educational investment and attempting to fit this model to Mexican data. A method of simulated moments procedure is used to estimate parameters of the model and the estimated parameters are then used to carry out policy simulations. The simulations show that increasing spending on police or increasing the severity of punishment reduces crime but has little effect on educational investment. Increased educational subsidies increase educational investment but reduce crime only slightly. Thus, one type of policy is insufficient to accomplish the goals of both reducing crime and increasing education. The third chapter is joint work with Prashant Bharadwaj, Giacomo De Giorgi, and Christopher Neilson. Boys tend to have better performances than girls in mathematical testing; in particular, there are significantly more boys than girls among high achievers and the score distribution appears to have a longer right tail for boys. We confirm such results on several low- and middle-income countries. In particular we find that the gender gap is already present by age 10 and substantially increases by age 14 and 15. We propose and try to test a series of explanations for such a gap: (i) parental investment, (ii) ability, (iii) school resources, (iv) individual investment and effort (not tested directly), (v) competitive environment, and (vi) cultural norms. We conclude that none of our proposed explanations can account for a substantial portion of the gap.
Essays On Economic And Social Networks
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Author : Adrien Vigier
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2011
Essays On Economic And Social Networks written by Adrien Vigier and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011 with categories.
Enterprise Networks And Courts Three Essays In Development Economics
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Author : Mattea Stein
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2018
Enterprise Networks And Courts Three Essays In Development Economics written by Mattea Stein and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018 with categories.
Social networks affect economic decision-making in all socio-economic contexts, influencing many aspects of social and economic life. They may play a particularly central role in the developing economy where formal institutions, which facilitate anonymous, arm's length transactions, tend to function less well. For example, when commercial courts are inefficient, or are inaccessible to a large share of the entrepreneur population, the social capital inherent in networks may be used to sustain contracting and collaboration. This thesis explores two facets of this thematic cluster. Two of its chapters investigate the mechanisms at work in horizontal business networks between small-scale entrepreneurs in Uganda. Using experimental variation from a randomized training and panel network data, I show that these networks can be endogenous to a public policy intervention, and that observed changes indicate strategic network formation behavior. A third chapter is concerned with how the efficiency of formal commercial dispute resolution can be enhanced, unpacking the mechanisms of institutional reform. Analyzing a reform in Senegal using high-frequency case-level data, it shows that procedural tweaks can have a large effects on speed without jeopardizing quality when judges' incentives are aligned.
Three Essays On Economic Development
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Author : Vania Bitia Salas García
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2013
Three Essays On Economic Development written by Vania Bitia Salas García and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2013 with categories.
Essays In Social Networks And Urban Development
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Author : Richard Anthony Ramsawak
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2018
Essays In Social Networks And Urban Development written by Richard Anthony Ramsawak and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018 with Climatic changes categories.
Essays On The Economics Of Social Networks
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Author : Won Hee Park
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2016
Essays On The Economics Of Social Networks written by Won Hee Park and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016 with categories.
This dissertation consists of two projects, both concerned with how social networks form and how they affect economic decisions. In the first project, entitled Identifying Influential Agents in a Social Network, I define influence centrality, a new measure of influence which combines information on node and neighbor characteristics as well as information on the network structure, by building a model of friendship formation and peer effects and calculating the change in the equilibrium behavior of the network when one node changes its behavior. I apply the model to the context of smoking among middle and high school students and show that a targeted anti-smoking intervention in which a small number of influential smoking students are treated may be more efficient than a uniform program where every student in the school receives the same anti-smoking treatment. The second project, entitled Quantifying Spillovers in Network Formation Over Time, is a joint work with Sean Chu and Shankar Kalyanaraman at Facebook. The goal of the project is to separately identify and understand the relative importance of network effects and unobserved heterogeneity in a multi-period network formation model. Here, we define network effects to be the effect of the number of mutual friends on the probability of friendship and assume that unobserved heterogeneity is time-consistent. We estimate the model on a de-identified panel data set from a small group of users on Facebook and find that both network effects and unobserved heterogeneity are statistically and economically significant predictors of friendship formation on Facebook. We further re-estimate the model first, without network effects and next, without unobserved heterogeneity. Comparing the results from these specifications, we find that network effects play a more important role than unobserved heterogeneity in network formation models on Facebook.