Social Investments, Informal Risk Sharing, and Inequality

We thank the National Science Foundation, SES-1155302, for funding the research that collected the data we use. Ambrus, Chandrasekhar and Elliott acknowledge financial support from National Science Foundation (NSF) grant "The economic benefits of investing into social relationships,'' SES-1429959. We thank Nageeb Ali, Ben Golub, Matt Jackson, Willemien Kets, Cynthia Kinnan, Rachel Kranton, Peter Landry, Horacio Larreguy, Melanie Morten, Kaivan Munshi and Luigi Pistaferri for helpful comments. We also thank seminar participants at the Calvo-Armengol prize conference, the Harvard-MIT theory seminar, Oxford, Microsoft Research, 2012 ThRed conference in Budapest, Syracuse, Ohio State University, Duke and the Tinbergen Institute. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.