The study of networks is useful for understanding many types of interaction, such as information transmission, friendship/trust, trade and exchange and responses to programme interventions. The PEPA research will consider the study of networks in relation to programme interventions. In particular, its different strands will consider whether certain programmes have spillover effects on one’s network, and whether the effects of programmes vary depending on one’s network.

The Social Networks project will address the following research questions:

• How can we best collect data on social networks?
• How and why is the impact of policy affected by social networks?
• Can social networks explain heterogeneity in the impact of a health intervention?

Project update:

Households in rural areas of developing countries face a wide variety of risks and adverse events, for instance to agriculture, employment and health. They often have limited scope to cope with adverse events through formal channels, as few government programmes exist and insurance and credit are not widely available. For these reasons, households might engage in informal strategies to cope with adverse events. Such strategies include transfers, loans, gifts and labour sharing. Social ties are likely to be important for setting up such informal strategies.

Interventions and policies may interact with the informal risk sharing provided by one’s social ties. For instance, they may crowd out such risk sharing, or interventions targeted at specific groups, such as women, can make these groups more attractive to transact with and so improve risk sharing.

Our objective in this research is to understand how a Women’s Group Intervention in rural Malawi changed risk sharing arrangements in extended family networks. In particular, it will assess whether, in response to unforeseen agricultural shocks, such informal risk sharing is higher in intervention than in control areas. This will provide evidence as to the extent to which using family ties to share risk has been crowded out by the intervention.

PEPA researchers have also conducted a large-scale and long-term randomized control trial of a program that simultaneously provides assets and training to the poorest women in rural Bangladesh. The evaluation tracks 7,000 eligible women over four years, as well as 16,000 women fr other wealth classes. Detailed information on the family and economic ties between households has been collected. In ongoing work, we are examining whether the benefits of the program dissipate through communities via network ties between households, and whether the underlying structure of networks themselves alter in response to the program.