Essays on the Social Origins of Economic and Political Behavior

Abstract

The first chapter asks why people rarely move to places where they can earn higher incomes. We use individual-level data from Facebook to find that social ties play a crucial role in explaining this puzzle: social ties are concentrated locally and shape migration decisions. On average, individuals live within 100 miles of nearly 80% of their friends, with less-educated individuals having even more concentrated social networks. To establish a causal link between the location of one's friends and migration, we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of friends' moves around individuals' college graduation. Having one more friend in a given commuting zone at the time of graduation increases one's likelihood of living there by 0.3 percentage points, which is comparable in magnitude to the effect of a $470 increase in annual wages. We incorporate these findings into a spatial equilibrium model and show that the magnitude of social network effects can explain why people stay in poorer places and why less-educated people are much less responsive to economic shocks. Overall, this study shows that social networks play a first-order role --- as important or more important than canonical economic factors such as wages and rents --- in determining residential choice at the individual and aggregate level. The second chapter asks how childhood environment shapes political behavior. We measure young voters’ participation and party affiliation in nationally comprehensive voter files and reconstruct their childhood location histories based on their parents’ addresses. We compare outcomes of individuals who moved between the same origin and destination counties but at different ages. Those who spend more time in the destination are more influenced by it: Growing up in a county where their peers are 10 percentage points more likely to become Republicans makes them 4.7 percentage points more likely to become Republican themselves upon entering the electorate. The effects are of similar magnitude for Democratic partisanship and turnout. These exposure effects are primarily driven by teenage years, and they persist but decay after the first election. They reflect both state-level factors and factors varying at a smaller scale such as peer effects. The third chapter uses friendship data from Facebook to study the social integration of Syrian migrants in Germany. Our analysis establishes five key findings: (1) Places differ substantially in their propensities to socially integrate migrants. This regional variation in integration outcomes largely reflects causal place-based effects. (2) Spatial variation in migrants' social integration can be decomposed into the rate at which Germans befriend their neighbors in general and the particular rate at which they befriend migrants versus other Germans. We follow the friending behavior of Germans that move across locations to show that both forces are more affected by local institutions and policies than by persistent individual characteristics or preferences of local natives. (3) Integration courses causally affect place-specific equilibrium integration levels by increasing the rate at which Germans befriend Syrian migrants. (4) Social integration helps migrants obtain help from natives across a range of settings such as finding jobs and housing. (5) Natives quasi-randomly exposed to a migrant in high school are more likely to befriend other migrants later in life.