Yves Zenou (@yveszenou.bsky.social)

Friendship Networks and Political Opinions (Forthcoming Article) - We examine how social interactions and friendships shape students' political opinions in a natural experiment at Sciences Po, a leading French university specializing in social and political sciences. The quasi-random assignment of students into short-term integration groups before their academic curriculum reduces political opinion gaps and fosters friendship formation. Using same-group membership as an instrumental variable for friendship, we find that friendship reduces opinion differences by 40% of a standard deviation in the opinion gap. Our evidence supports a homophily-enforced mechanism: friendships form among initially politically similar students, leading them to join political associations together, reinforcing their similarity. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20231344&from=f