Social Investments, Informal Risk Sharing, and Inequality

Matthew Elliott, Arun Chandrasekhar and Attila Ambrus
Additional contact information
Matthew Elliott: Caltech
Arun Chandrasekhar: Stanford
Attila Ambrus: Duke University

No 189, 2015 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: This paper studies costly network formation in the context of risk sharing. Neighboring agents negotiate agreements as in Stole and Zwiebel (1996), which results in the social surplus being allocated according to the Myerson value. We uncover two types of inefficiency: overinvestment in social relationships within group (e.g., caste, ethnicity), but underinvestment across group. We find a novel tradeoff between efficiency and equality. Both within and across groups, inefficiencies are minimized by increasing social inequality, which results in financial inequality and increasing the centrality of the most central agents. Evidence from 75 Indian village networks is congruent with our model.

Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-net and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2015/paper_189.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed015:189

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2015 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().