Research Papers

We critically reviewed Robert Putnam’s influential work, “Bowling Alone,” focusing on its analysis of social capital in America. We assessed the book’s strengths and weaknesses, highlighting both its extensive documentation of community life and its conceptual and empirical shortcomings.

We aimed to evaluate “Bowling Alone” within the broader context of social capital literature, identifying its contributions and limitations. This evaluation helps to understand the validity and implications of Putnam’s claims about social capital’s role in socioeconomic phenomena.

Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of “Bowling Alone” is essential for assessing the broader social capital literature. By critically examining Putnam’s analysis, we can better gauge the importance of social capital in explaining socioeconomic outcomes and inform future research in this field.

We explored the implications of studies on cross-country growth determinants for evaluating alternative policies. We analyzed the insights gained from empirical growth studies over the past fifteen years and their role in understanding the growth experiences of various countries.

We aimed to assess how empirical growth studies, influenced by seminal works of Lucas and Romer, contribute to the evaluation of different growth policies. This helps in understanding the practical applications of theoretical growth models.

Evaluating alternative policies based on cross-country growth studies provides valuable insights for macroeconomic policy-making. Understanding similarities and differences in growth experiences aids in formulating effective and context-specific economic strategies.

We examine the way in which empirical evidence is developed in support of a role for social capital in socioeconomic outcomes. It reviews three leading studies of social capital and provides a general set of conditions under which social capital effects may be identified in linear models.

A number of difficulties exist with the empirical analysis of social capital. To improve empirical studies of social capital, this paper aims to question whether the empirical evidence so far adduced to support a significant explanatory role for social capital achieves this objective.

One of the most striking developments in social science over the last decade is the rise of interest in social capital as a mechanism for understanding socio‐economic phenomena. This enthusiasm has not been restricted to sociologists; within economics and other disciplines interest in social capital has grown dramatically as well.

We analyze aggregate behavioral outcomes when individual utility exhibits social interaction effects. We study generalized logistic models of individual choice, which incorporate terms reflecting individuals’ desire to conform to others’ behavior in an environment of noncooperative decision-making.

We provide an analytical framework-random fields-for studying economies in which social interactions are embedded in individual decisions.

A large body of recent research has begun to consider the role of social interactions in economic behavior. The intuition that individuals seek to conform to the behavior of reference groups has found successful application in a number of circumstances.

This paper describes a perspective on the causes of poverty: a membership based theory. It describes the main ideas of the memberships theory, characterizes the empirical evidence, and remarks on its implications for anti-poverty policy.

One important scientific aspect of the research on group memberships, poverty, and inequality is that it represents an attempt to integrate ideas from sociology and social psychology into economics. This paper attempts to identify the weaknesses in the links between theory, empirics, and policy in this research and suggest opportunities for future research.

Since 1965, social scientists have long been aware of the importance of group influences as a cause of socioeconomic deprivation. Since 1980’s there has been a major change in thinking about poverty towards group-based explanations within the economics community.

We explained how empirical studies of economic growth do not reflect the theoretical perspective of growth economics and how to reconcile these two branches of growth economics to advance the field.

Despite the significant number of studies in the area over the last 15 years, growth economics has not experienced similar progress seen in many areas of micro and macroeconomics.

Economic growth represents an important aspect of economics.

We introduced demographers to the social interactions approach in economics by developing an analytical framework that shows how the rational-choice approach of neoclassical economics can be combined with social factors. We also presented models to provide qualitative insights into fertility transitions.

We wanted to add to the strand of demography literature based on contextual effects in fertility by emphasizing how the existing approaches can be embedded in a structural model of choices that embodies both contextual effects as well as feedback from the actual decisions of group members.

No topic in demography has received as much theoretical and empirical attention as the study of fertility transitions. Yet, no single theory explains the historical record of transitions in a sufficiently comprehensive way to dominate its competitors.

We describe a range of methods that have been proposed to study interactions in economic and social contexts. We provide a general choice-based framework for modeling such interactions, analyze the econometrics of these models, and review some empirical work on interactions.

We want to provide a framework that illustrates the relationship between interactions-based models and models in statistical mechanics to improve modeling strategies in this field.

The role of interactions in economic outcomes has become an important area of research over the last decade. Interactions-based models have been applied to a wide range of contexts both within economics and within social science more generally.

We question current empirical practice in the study of growth. We aim to outline a perspective on empirical growth research that will both address some of the major criticisms to which this research has been subjected and facilitate policy-relevant empirics.

We argue that much of the modern empirical growth literature is based on assumptions about regressors, residuals, and parameters that are implausible from the perspective of both economic theory and the historical experiences of the countries under study.

The endogenous growth models pioneered in Romer (1986, 1990) and Lucas (1988) have produced a sea change in the sorts of questions around which macroeconomic research is focused. In empirical macroeconomics, efforts to explain cross-country differences in growth behavior since World War II have become a predominant area of research. The implications of this work for policymakers are immense.

We generalized the empirical analysis of the Solow growth model to account for country-specific heterogeneity, relaxing the common assumption that all countries have identical aggregate production functions. Our analysis revealed significant country-specific variations in Solow parameters linked to differences in initial income levels.

We aimed to enhance the explanatory power of the Solow growth model by incorporating country-specific factors. This approach allows for a more accurate representation of the diverse economic environments across different countries.

Recognizing and incorporating country-specific heterogeneity in growth models improves their explanatory value and accuracy. This enhanced model provides better insights into the economic growth processes of individual countries, leading to more tailored and effective economic policies.