Social capital and social support are two key constructs in the study of social networks and health. Despite their importance, little research has sought to examine the characteristics of those social ties by which individuals access social capital and support resources. Network diversity - a key structural feature in accessing social capital - refers to a person's broad but generally weak and ...

Are people who remain active as webloggers more socially connected to other users? How are the number and nature of social ties related to people's willingness to continue contributing content to a weblog? This study uses longitudinal data taken from Wallop, a weblogging system developed by Microsoft Research, to explore patterns of user activity. In its year long operation Wallop hosted a natu...

We study how the pre-existing social network ties between the CEO and outside board members are associated with the firms’ voluntary financial disclosure practices, proxied by management earnings guidance. We construct social network ties by considering the social ties in addition to the statutory ties. After controlling firm and year fixed effects, we find a substantially strong, negative rela...

In today’s globalized world, firms are increasingly seen shifting from the traditional innovation model 1 which relied on a firm’s internal R&D to the more porous open innovation paradigm which utilizes resources both internal and external to a firm to come up with innovations. However success in the open innovation paradigm is contingent upon some internal and external factors of a firm. This ...

The strength of weak ties is that they tend to be long – they connect socially distant locations. Recent research on “small worlds” shows that remarkably few long ties are needed to give large and highly clustered populations the “degrees of separation” of a random network, in which information can rapidly diffuse. We test whether this “strength of weak ties” generalizes from simple to complex ...

A small world (SW) is a (large) graph with both local clustering and, on average, short distances between nodes [1,2]. Short distances promote accessibility, whereas local clustering and redundancy of edges, as some research suggests [3,4], promotes robustness to disconnection and, through multiple independent pathways, reliable accessibility as well. For paths to transmit materials and informa...

Are interactions with unrelated and even unknown individuals a by-product of modern life in megacities? Here we argue instead that social ties among non-kin are a crucial human adaptation. By deploying a new portable wireless sensing technology (motes), we mapped social networks in Agta and BaYaka hunter-gatherers in unprecedented detail. We show that strong friendships with non-kin optimize th...

This study examines the financing choices of firms operating in a weak institutional environment. We argue that in relationship-based systems, global financing and strong political connections are alternative means to create firm value. Well-connected firms might be less inclined to access global capital markets because (state-owned) domestic banks provide capital at low cost. Moreover, the exp...

In this paper, we study the corporate transparency choices of firms operating in a weak institutional environment. We argue that in relationship-based systems, high levels of corporate transparency and strong political connections are alternative means to create firm value. Firms can try to commit to more transparency by issuing securities abroad. However, the expanded disclosures and additiona...