MATCHING AND NETWORK EFFECTS

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Fafchamps, Marcel; Goyal, Sanjeev; van der Leij, Marco J.
• 署名单位: University of Oxford; University of Cambridge; Universitat d'Alacant
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1542-4766
• DOI: 10.1162/jeea.2010.8.1.203
• 发表日期: 2010
• 页码: 203-231
• 关键词: labor-market

摘要

The matching of individuals in teams is a key element in the functioning of an economy. The network of social ties can potentially transmit important information on abilities and reputations and also help mitigate matching frictions by facilitating interactions among screened individuals. We conjecture that the probability of two individuals forming a team falls in the distance between the two individuals in the network of existing social ties. The objective of this paper is to empirically test this conjecture. We examine the formation of coauthor relations among economists over a twenty-year period. Our principal finding is that a new collaboration emerges faster among two researchers if they are closer in the existing coauthor network among economists. This proximity effect on collaboration is strong: Being at a network distance of 2 instead of 3, for instance, raises the probability of initiating a collaboration by 27%. (JEL: C78, D83, D85)