Three Essays on Social Structure and Its Implications

Download or read book Three Essays on Social Structure and Its Implications written by Pauline Morault and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Ph.D. thesis emphasizes the importance of social structure to understand some economic, social and political outcomes. The first chapter is a political economy piece exploring the impact of the social structure of the elite on resource allocation, scapegoating strategies and violence in developing countries. It extends the framework of Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) by distinguishing between a political elite and an economic elite composed of a rich ethnic minority. It then explores how the degree of social integration between the two elites impacts equilibria in this economy. The second chapter studies how familial decision-making impact marriage patterns in societies where arranged marriages are the dominant form of matchmaking. It introduces families into the Becker-Shapley-Shubik (1971,1973) matching model and defines a concept of familial stability. It then compares individual-stable to family-stable matchings. It shows that family-stable matchings depend on the familial structure. The third chapter analyzes the structure of the family network resulting from arranged marriages. When parents arrange the marriages of their children with spouses from different families, this creates marital connections between families. The study considers a matching model in which parents first allocate an investment to their children and then arrange their marriages. It then explores how social norms, sex ratio and revenue dispersion impact network connectivity.