Social Structure, State, and Economic Activity
Interconnected Conflict
We study a model of conflict with multiple battlefields and the possibility of investments spillovers between the battlefields. Results of conflicts at the individual battlefields are determined by the Tullock contest success function based on efforts assigned to a battlefield as well as efforts spilling over from the neighbouring battlefields. We characterize Nash equilibria of this model and uncover a network invariance result: equilibrium payoffs, equilibrium total expenditure, and equilibrium probabilities of winning individual battlefields are independent of the network of spillovers.
Building an Alliance to Map Global Supply Networks
The global economy consists of more than 300 million firms, connected through an estimated 13 billion supply links [see supplementary materials (SM)], that produce most goods and services. It has long been unthinkable to analyze the world economy at the firm level, even less so its intricate network of supply chain linkages. This blind spot has left us ill-prepared to make fast and well-informed decisions, begetting, for example, prolonged shortages in raw materials and critical medical supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Networks Webinar - Antonio Cabrales
Abstract
Corporate Culture and Organizational Fragility
Complex organizations accomplish tasks through many steps of collaboration among workers. Corporate culture supports collaborations by establishing norms and reducing misunderstandings. Because a strong corporate culture relies on costly, voluntary investments by many workers, we model it as an organizational public good, subject to standard free-riding problems, which become severe in large organizations.
Networks Webinar - Evan Sadler
Evan's research focuses on two main areas, the economics of networks and incentives within organizations.
See Evan's personal website for more information.
Title: "Games on Endogenous Networks," a joint project with Ben Golub
Gender and Collaboration
We connect gender disparities in research output and collaboration patterns in economics. We first document large gender gaps in research output. These gaps persist across 50 years despite a significant increase in the fraction of women in economics during that time. We further show that output differences are closely related to differences in the co-authorship networks of men and women: women have fewer collaborators, collaborate more often with the same co-authors, and a higher fraction of their co-authors collaborate with each other.