factual

Broad Network Proxies Close Friends

Although intuition suggests only close friends should matter, restricting the analysis to people's 5 or 10 closest friends (measured by wall posts and messages) yields almost identical results to the full ~500-friend network, because a person's broad social net is representative of who their close friends are; the two are highly correlated.

factualpending

Speaker

Raj Chetty

Evidence Quote

your broader social net is representative of who your close friends are... Because those two things are really correlated, it turns out that using the full Facebook network actually gives you a pretty good proxy for what we're interested in.

Source

Raj Chetty on Economic MobilityEconTalk
Created: 6/13/2026, 3:35:10 AM

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