Social Capital and Innovation: Evidence from Facebook Friendship Networks

Brad Cannon, David Hirshleifer and Joshua Thornton

No 35732, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Using Facebook friendship data, we study how three aspects of social capital shape innovative activity. We find that the most important aspect of social capital in explaining innovation is Economic Connectedness (EC)--the share of high-income friendships. One standard deviation greater EC is associated with 97% more patents per capita among patenting ZIP Codes and 45% more breakthrough patents per capita among ZIP Codes with breakthrough patents. Reverse-causality tests, a within-inventor relocation design, and a quasi-experiment using fracking-driven economic shocks to non-local friends support a causal interpretation. Mechanism tests provide evidence consistent with a financing channel.

JEL-codes: D14 D25 D83 D85 D9 G32 G41 G51 O16 O3 O33 O35 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-09
Note: CF PR
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35732.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:35732

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35732
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().