Angelo Mele, PhD

Angelo Mele, PhD is an Associate Professor of Economics. He is also Affiliate Faculty at the Hopkins Population Center and Affiliate member of the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science. Prof. Mele is an applied econometrician and his work focuses on the economic analysis of social interactions and their impact on socioeconomic performance at the individual and aggregate level. His research interests include the econometrics of social network models, the analysis of racial segregation and homophily, professional networks, social contagion in online media, software dependency networks and computational methods for large networks.

Education

• Ph. D, Economics, University of Illinois
• MA, Economics, New York University
• BA, Economics, Bocconi University

Research

Selected publications

• Homophily and Community Structure at Scale: An Application to a Large Professional Network (May 2023) with Juan Nelson Martinez Dahbura, Shota Komatsu, and Takanori Nishida, AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023
• Approximate Variational Estimation for a Model of Network Formation (with Lingjiong Zhu) January 2023, The Review of Economics and Statistics, vol. 105, no 1, pages 113-124
• Spectral estimation for large stochastic blockmodels with nodal covariates (October 2022), (with Lingxin Hao, Joshua Cape, Carey Priebe) (forthcoming), Journal of Business and Economic Statistics
• A Structural Model of Homophily and Clustering in Social Networks (June 2022), Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, vol. 40, issue 3, pages 1377-1389
• On spectral algorithms for community detection in stochastic blockmodel graphs with vertex covariates (May 2022) (with Cong Mu, Lingxin Hao, Joshua Cape, Avanti Athreya, Carey Priebe), Transactions of Network Science and Engineering, vol. 9, no 5, pages 3373-3384
• Does School Desegregation Promote Diverse Interactions? An Equilibrium Model of Segregation within Schools (May 2020), American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, vol. 12, issue 2, pages 228-257
• A Structural Model of Dense Network Formation, (May 2017), Econometrica, vol. 85, issue 3, pages 825-850
• Viral Altruism? Charitable Giving and Social Contagion in On-Line Networks (March 2016) (with Nicola Lacetera and Mario Macis), Sociological Science

Working papers

• A model of inter-organizational network formation (January 2023) (with Shweta Gaonkar), resubmitted to Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
• A Strategic Model of Software Dependency Networks (January 2023), (with Co-Pierre Georg)
• A structural model of business card exchange networks (August 2021) (with Juan Nelson Martinez Dahbura, Takanori Nishida and Shota Komatsu)

Teaching

Current

• Non-Linear Econometrics for Finance

Honors and distinctions

• Black and Decker Research Grant 2017, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School (with Shweta Gaonkar) $2500
• Internal grant 2016, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School (with Shweta Gaonkar) $3000
• NET Institute Summer Grant 2013, $3000, Net Institute, NYU Stern
• NET Institute Summer Grant 2012, $7500, Net Institute, NYU Stern (with Nicola Lacetera and Mario Macis)
• 2009-11 - R.W. Harbeson Dissertation Fellowship, UIUC
• 2008-09 - E.B. McNatt Award for Research in Labor Economics, UIUC
• 2007 and 2008 - Hans Brems Award (Best Graduate Research Paper), UIUC