| Over the past decades, economists have increasingly taken note of the importance of social networks in determining choices and behaviors in a wide variety of settings. More recently, researchers have taken note of the role of network endogeneity--that is, people choosing their peer groups--in informing our understanding of many relationships. This dissertation consists of three chapters that investigate the role of social networks in economics, with a focus on applications in developing-country settings. Chapter 1 derives a new methodology to predict the effects of policies that assign people to groups, while taking account of the fact that actors choose their peers and peers affect outcomes. Chapter 2 investigates the sensitivity of estimate of the effect of peers to a particular and widely-used data collection process. In joint work, Chapter 3 investigates the eects of a particular development program targeted at adolescent girls, taking account of the fact that program assignment affects patterns of interaction. Taken together, these chapters form the beginning of a long-term research agenda that seeks to understand the causes and effects of social networks in development economics. |
