[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/23608.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Measuring Social Connectedness

Author

Listed:
  • Michael Bailey
  • Ruiqing (Rachel) Cao
  • Theresa Kuchler
  • Johannes Stroebel
  • Arlene Wong
Abstract
We introduce a new measure of social connectedness between U.S. county-pairs, as well as between U.S. counties and foreign countries. Our measure, which we call the "Social Connectedness Index" (SCI), is based on the number of friendship links on Facebook, the world's largest online social networking service. Within the U.S., social connectedness is strongly decreasing in geographic distance between counties: for the population of the average county, 62.8% of friends live within 100 miles. The populations of counties with more geographically dispersed social networks are generally richer, more educated, and have a higher life expectancy. Region-pairs that are more socially connected have higher trade flows, even after controlling for geographic distance and the similarity of regions along other economic and demographic measures. Higher social connectedness is also associated with more cross-county migration and patent citations. Social connectedness between U.S. counties and foreign countries is correlated with past migration patterns, with social connectedness decaying in the time since the primary migration wave from that country. Trade with foreign countries is also strongly related to social connectedness. These results suggest that the SCI captures an important role of social networks in facilitating both economic and social interactions. Our findings also highlight the potential for the SCI to mitigate the measurement challenges that pervade empirical research on the role of social interactions across the social sciences.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael Bailey & Ruiqing (Rachel) Cao & Theresa Kuchler & Johannes Stroebel & Arlene Wong, 2017. "Measuring Social Connectedness," NBER Working Papers 23608, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23608
    Note: AP CF DAE EFG ITI LE LS PE PR
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w23608.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Michael Bailey & Eduardo Dávila & Theresa Kuchler & Johannes Stroebel, 2019. "House Price Beliefs And Mortgage Leverage Choice," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 86(6), pages 2403-2452.
    2. Bogang Jun & Aamena Alshamsi & Jian Gao & César A. Hidalgo, 2020. "Bilateral relatedness: knowledge diffusion and the evolution of bilateral trade," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 30(2), pages 247-277, April.
    3. Bogang Jun & Aamena Alshamsi & Jian Gao & Cesar A Hidalgo, 2017. "Relatedness, Knowledge Diffusion, and the Evolution of Bilateral Trade," Papers 1709.05392, arXiv.org.
    4. Igra, Mark & Kenworthy, Nora & Luchsinger, Cadence & Jung, Jin-Kyu, 2021. "Crowdfunding as a response to COVID-19: Increasing inequities at a time of crisis," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 282(C).
    5. Büchel, Konstantin & Ehrlich, Maximilian v., 2020. "Cities and the structure of social interactions: Evidence from mobile phone data," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 119(C).
    6. Yilmazkuday, Hakan, 2012. "Understanding interstate trade patterns," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 86(1), pages 158-166.
    7. Kim, Jun Sung & Patacchini, Eleonora & Picard, Pierre M. & Zenou, Yves, 2017. "Urban Interactions," Working Paper Series 1192, Research Institute of Industrial Economics.
    8. Nathan Deutscher & Bhashkar Mazumder, 2023. "Measuring Intergenerational Income Mobility: A Synthesis of Approaches," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 61(3), pages 988-1036, September.
    9. Ma, Dan & Zhang, Chuan & Hui, Yarong & Xu, Bing, 2022. "Economic uncertainty spillover and social networks," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 145(C), pages 454-467.
    10. Mr. Damien Puy & Mr. Anil Ari & Ms. Yu Shi, 2020. "Foreign Demand and Local House Prices: Evidence from the US," IMF Working Papers 2020/043, International Monetary Fund.
    11. Bäckman, Claes & Hanspal, Tobin, 2018. "Participation and Losses in Multi-Level Marketing: Evidence from an FTC Settlement," Working Papers 2018:13, Lund University, Department of Economics, revised 22 Aug 2019.
    12. Aaronson, Daniel & Faber, Jacob & Hartley, Daniel & Mazumder, Bhashkar & Sharkey, Patrick, 2021. "The long-run effects of the 1930s HOLC “redlining” maps on place-based measures of economic opportunity and socioeconomic success," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    13. Badarinza, Cristian & Ramadorai, Tarun, 2018. "Home away from home? Foreign demand and London house prices," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 130(3), pages 532-555.
    14. repec:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/4j5snkuat19kma9diah5p0g5eq is not listed on IDEAS
    15. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/4j5snkuat19kma9diah5p0g5eq is not listed on IDEAS

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D1 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior
    • E0 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General
    • E7 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macro-Based Behavioral Economics
    • F1 - International Economics - - Trade
    • I1 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health
    • J6 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers
    • O3 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23608. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.