Mengjie Pan

Social network data is often prohibitively expensive to collect, limiting empirical network research. Typical economic network mapping requires (1) enumerating a census, (2) eliciting the names of all network links for each individual, (3) matching the list of social connections to the census, and (4) repeating (1)-(3) across many networks. In settings requiring field surveys, steps (2)-(3) can be very expensive. In other network populations such as financial intermediaries or high-risk groups, proprietary data and privacy concerns may render (2)-(3) impossible. Both restrict the accessibility of high-quality networks research to investigators with considerable resources. We propose an inexpensive and feasible strategy for network elicitation using Aggregated Relational Data (ARD) – resp...

Published: Emily Breza & Arun G. Chandrasekhar & Tyler H. McCormick & Mengjie Pan, 2020. "Using Aggregated Relational Data to Feasibly Identify Network Structure without Network Data," American Economic Review, vol 110(8), pages 2454-2484.