"Embeddedness, Experience, or Distance? Social Capital and Access to Valuable Transactions"

This paper investigates how social affiliations between real estate listing agents and home sellers impacts the agent selection process, and the types of transactions agents engage in. While many studies have argued that factors such as status and reputation act as entry barriers and create advantages for high status or high reputation firms, it remains unclear how social affiliations impact the selection process, particularly under conditions of incomplete information. Using a unique approach that pairs data from the Utah Multiple Listing Services with data on LDS church congregation boundaries in Utah County, Utah for 1998-2014, I explore how social affiliations between home sellers and agents through geographically-assigned Mormon church congregations influence the selection process and the type of transactions agents engage in. I find that affiliations allow agents to list more expensive, larger, and higher quality homes compared to when listing for non-affiliates, and to list such homes at low levels...