Research

My research studies how social interactions affect individual and aggregated economic performance.

Publications

• Spectral estimation of large stochastic blockmodels with discrete nodal covariates, December 2023 (with Lingxin Hao, Joshua Cape and Carey Priebe), Journal of Business and Economic Statistics 41(4), pp 1364-1376

  • grdpg: R package to implement spectral methods for SBMs
     

• A model of inter-organizational network formation (with Shweta Gaonkar), October 2023, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 214: 82-104

  • Example of code and data: files to explain the estimation and counterfactual simulations in the paper. Data are fake (we cannot share the original data).
     

• Homophily and Community Structure at Scale: An Application to a Large Professional Network, May 2023 (with Juan Nelson Martinez Dahbura, Shota Komatsu and Takanori Nishida), AEA Papers and Proceedings 2023 

• Approximate Variational Estimation for a Model of Network Formation, Jan 2023, Review of Economics and Statistics 105 (1): 113–124 (with Lingjiong Zhu )

  • mfergm: Replication package on Github
     

• On spectral algorithms for community detection in stochastic blockmodel graphs with vertex covariates, May 2022, IEEE Transactions of Network Science and Engineering, volume 9, issue 5, pp. 3373 - 3384 (journal link) (with Cong Mu, Avanti Athreya, Lingxin Hao, Joshua Cape and Carey Priebe)  

• A Structural Model of Homophily and Clustering in Social Networks, (June 2022), Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, vol. 40, issue 3, pages 1377-1389 (journal version)  

• Does school desegregation promote diverse interactions? An equilibrium model of segregation within schools, May 2020, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, vol. 12, issue 2, pages 228-257 (previously circulated as: Segregation in Social Networks: A structural approach)

  • Replication files
     

• A structural model of dense network formation, May 2017, Econometrica, vol. 85, issue 3, pages 825-850 (published version)

  • Online appendices: A B C D E
  • netnew: R package for replication  

• Viral Altruism? Generosity and social contagion in online networks, March 2016, Sociological Science (with Mario Macis and Nicola Lacetera )

• Structural Models of Complementary Choices, Marketing Letters, 25, 3, pp: 245-256 Springer (with Steve Berry, Ahmed Khwaja, Vineet Kumar, Andres Musalem, Ken Wilbur, Greg Allenby, Bharat Anand, Pradeep Chintagunta, Michael Hanemann, Przemek Jeziorski) Choice Symposium Invited Submission from Marketing Letters

• Poisson Indices of Segregation (2013) Regional Science and Urban Economics 43, pages 65–85

  • Example: includes R code, R package, data for New York, readme files
  • Spatial Dissimilarity: 1990 2000 – Spatial Exposure: 1990 2000 – Spatial Fragmentation: 1990 2000

Working papers, submitted, revised

• A Strategic Model of Software Dependency Networks, (with Cornelius Fritz, Co-Pierre Georg and Michael Schweinberger)

• Latent Communities in Employment Relations and Wage Distributions: A Network Approach (with Lingxin Hao, Joshua Cape, Avanti Athreya, Cong Mu and Carey Priebe), Submitted

• A structural model of business card exchange networks (with Juan Nelson Martinez Dahbura, Takanori Nishida and Shota Komatsu), August 2021 new version coming soon

  • lighthergm: R library for scalable estimation of HERGMs
     

• A structural model of firm collaborations with unobserved heterogeneity, (with Shweta Gaonkar), new version coming soon

• Creativity and Market Success: Evidence from the movie industry (with Shweta Gaonkar), Reject and Resubmit at Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal

New and in progress

• Spectral estimation of a dynamic network formation model (with Avanti Athreya, Joshua Cape, Cong Mu, Lingxing Hao and Carey Priebe)
• A variational exchange algorithm for Bayesian estimation of ERGM models
• Microeconomic foundations of a latent position network model
• Network (video)games (with Micah Pollak and Phil Solimine)

Old stuff

• Approximate Variational Inference for a Model of Social Interactions

• Racial Segregation and Public School Expenditure (with Eliana La Ferrara )

• Who is afraid of the big bad wolf? Do pedophiles live closer to schools?