IIT Bombay is organising an Institute Colloquium on Thursday, August 16, 2012. The details are as follows:
Title : Diffusion of Microfinance
Speaker : Prof. Matthew Jackson
William D. Eberle Professor of Economics
Stanford University
Day & Date : Thursday, August 16, 2012
Time : 3.00 p.m.
Venue : Main Auditorium, VMCC
Abstract: We examine how participation in a microfinance program diffuses through social networks, using detailed demographic, social network, and participation data from 43 villages in South India. We exploit exogenous variation in the importance (in a network sense) of the people who were first informed about the program, the “injection points.” Microfinance participation is significantly higher when the injection points have higher eigenvector centrality. We also estimate structural models of diffusion that allow us to (i) determine the relative roles of basic information transmission versus other forms of peer influence, and (ii) distinguish information passing by participants and non-participants. We find that participants are significantly more likely to pass information on to friends and acquaintances than informed non-participants. However, information-passing by non-participants is still substantial and significant, accounting for roughly one-third of informedness and participation. We also find that, once we have properly conditioned on an individual being informed, her decision to participate is not significantly affected by the participation of her acquaintances.
About the Speaker:
Prof. Matthew Jackson received his Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Princeton University in 1984 and Ph.D. in Economics from the Stanford University in 1988. Prof. Jackson is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at the Stanford University, CA. Prof. Jackson is an eminent researcher and pioneer in social networks research. He has won several distinctions and has authored the definitive book on social networks. Among his honors are the fellowship of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Econometric Society, as well as the Arrow prize.
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IEOR is hosting Prof Jackson's visit to the department before the colloquium talk.