arXiv research

Are expansions and recessions more likely to end as their magnitude increases? In this paper we apply parametric hazard models to investigate this issue in a sample of 16 countries from 1881 to 2000. For the total sample we find evidence of positive magnitude dependence for recessions, while for expansions we are not a…

HSBC grew from colonial China through wars, surviving unethical practices.

Paper proposes a new model to prevent tariff wars by balancing trade balances.

We investigate the role of networks of alliances in preventing (multilateral) interstate wars. We first show that, in the absence of international trade, no network of alliances is peaceful and stable. We then show that international trade induces peaceful and stable networks: trade increases the density of alliances s…

New findings show pure strategy equilibria are more robust in a war of attrition game.

The paper uses machine learning to predict the impact of the Ukraine crisis on financial markets.

Study reveals clusters of resilient and vulnerable Spanish agri-food firms post-Ukraine-Russia war.

Territorial control is a key aspect shaping the dynamics of civil war. Despite its importance, we lack data on territorial control that are fine-grained enough to account for subnational spatio-temporal variation and that cover a large set of conflicts. To resolve this issue, we propose a theoretical model of the relat…

Study analyzes stock order transitions during US-China trade war using Markov chains.

We perform detrending moving average analysis (DMA) and detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) of the WTI crude oil futures prices (1983-2012) to investigate its efficiency. We further put forward a strict statistical test in the spirit of bootstrapping to verify the weak-form market efficiency hypothesis by employing th…

We present a new, efficient method for automatically detecting severe conflicts `edit wars' in Wikipedia and evaluate this method on six different language WPs. We discuss how the number of edits, reverts, the length of discussions, the burstiness of edits and reverts deviate in such pages from those following the gene…

This paper examines how the U.S.--China trade war affects stock markets, finding evidence of financial contagion and changes in risk channels.

Noisy labels often occur in vision datasets, especially when they are obtained from crowdsourcing or Web scraping. We propose a new regularization method, which enables learning robust classifiers in presence of noisy data. To achieve this goal, we propose a new adversarial regularization scheme based on the Wasserstei…

DefogGAN predicts hidden RTS game information to aid strategic decision-making.

It is demonstrated that the US economy has on the long-term in reality been governed by the Keynesian approach to economics independent of the current official economical policy. This is done by calculating the two-point correlation function between the fluctuations of the DJIA and the US public debt. We find that the …

Just as war is sometimes fallaciously represented as a zero sum game -- when in fact war is a negative sum game - stock market trading, a positive sum game over time, is often erroneously represented as a zero sum game. This is called the "zero sum fallacy" -- the erroneous belief that one trader in a stock market exch…

We develop an option pricing model based on a tug-of-war game. This two-player zero-sum stochastic differential game is formulated in the context of a multi-dimensional financial market. The issuer and the holder try to manipulate asset price processes in order to minimize and maximize the expected discounted reward. W…

We consider a stochastic game of contribution to the common good in which the players have continuous control over the degree of contribution, and we examine the gradualism arising from the free rider effect. This game belongs to the class of variable concession games which generalize wars of attrition. Previously know…

It has been shown that the long term evolution of the Gross Product of the World after World War II can be well portrayed by the exponential function with the crossover at the year 1973, cinsiding with the Oil Crisis onset. For the the Standard and Poor 500 index the single exponential behavior extends down to at least…

Study shows negative war news correlates with increased stock market volatility.

We consider the problem of high-level strategy selection in the adversarial setting of real-time strategy games from a reinforcement learning perspective, where taking an action corresponds to switching to the respective strategy. Here, a good strategy successfully counters the opponent's current and possible future st…

Here, we present the World Trade Atlas 1870-2013, a collection of annual world trade maps in which distance combines economic size and the different dimensions that affect international trade beyond mere geography. Trade distances, which are based on a gravity model predicting the existence of significant trade channel…

Study examines how war impacts financial entropy.

Socio-economic inequality is measured using various indices. The Gini ($g$) index, giving the overall inequality is the most commonly used, while the recently introduced Kolkata ($k$) index gives a measure of $1-k$ fraction of population who possess top $k$ fraction of wealth in the society. This article reviews the ch…

HSBC grew from Hong Kong to global dominance despite political upheavals.

This study explores the time-varying structure of market efficiency in the prewar and wartime Japanese stock market using a new market capitalization-weighted stock price index, the equity performance index. We examine whether the adaptive market hypothesis (AMH) is supported in that era. First, we find that the degree…

This paper studies the interrelation between spot and futures prices in the two major rice markets in prewar Japan from the perspective of market efficiency. Applying a non-Bayesian time-varying model approach to the fundamental equation for spot returns and the futures premium, we detect when efficiency reductions in …

New method maps global value chains at product level from trade data.

In many developing countries intellectual property infringement and the commerce of pirate goods is an entrepreneurial activity. Digital piracy is very often the only media for having access to music, cinema, books and software. At the same time, bio-prospecting and infringement of indigenous knowledge rights by intern…

The paper uses conformal prediction for forecasting conflict sequences in Markov processes.

Unfulfilled expectations from macro-economic initiatives during the Great Recession and the massive shift into globalization echo today with political upheaval, anti-establishment propaganda, and looming trade/currency wars that threaten domestic and international value chains. Once stable entities like the EU now look…

The paper analyzes sterling bills of exchange during the first globalization, revealing their global financial role.

Cascading chains of events are a salient feature of many real-world social, biological, and financial networks. In social networks, social reciprocity accounts for retaliations in gang interactions, proxy wars in nation-state conflicts, or Internet memes shared via social media. Neuron spikes stimulate or inhibit spike…

Buried landmines and unexploded remnants of war are a constant threat for the population of many countries that have been hit by wars in the past years. The huge amount of human lives lost due to this phenomenon has been a strong motivation for the research community toward the development of safe and robust techniques…

Trade finance history traced from medieval origins to modern markets.

The World Trade Web (WTW) is a weighted network whose nodes correspond to countries with edge weights reflecting the value of imports and/or exports between countries. In this paper we introduce to this macroeconomic system the notion of extinction analysis, a technique often used in the analysis of ecosystems, for the…

New method decomposes local projections to reveal historical drivers of estimates.

Economic growth is unpredictable unless demand is quantified. We solve this problem by introducing the demand for unpaid spare time and a user quantity named human capacity. It organizes and amplifies spare time required for enjoying affluence like physical capital, the technical infrastructure for production, organize…

Geodesic flows on certain surfaces are shown to be semi-conjugate to expansive flows.

Study geodesic flows on hyperbolic manifolds without conjugate points, proving unique measure of maximal entropy.

In this paper we study the financial repercussions of the destruction of two fully armed and operational moon-sized battle stations ("Death Stars") in a 4-year period and the dissolution of the galactic government in Star Wars. The emphasis of this work is to calibrate and simulate a model of the banking and financial …

Macroeconomic theories of growth and wealth distribution have an outsized influence on national and international social and economic policies. Yet, due to a relative lack of reliable, system wide data, many such theories remain, at best, unvalidated and, at worst, misleading. In this paper, we introduce a novel econom…

This study proposes an equal-weight portfolio strategy to reduce risk compared to traditional ETFs.

A method to prevent image representation collapse through data-dependent augmentation.

Bayesian inference has great promise for the privacy-preserving analysis of sensitive data, as posterior sampling automatically preserves differential privacy, an algorithmic notion of data privacy, under certain conditions (Dimitrakakis et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2015). While this one posterior sample (OPS) approach e…

The major study by Bordo and Helbing (2003) analyses the business cycle in Western economies 1881-2001. They examine four distinct periods in economic history, and conclude that there is a secular trend towards greater synchronisation for much of the 20th century. Their analysis, in common with the standard economic li…

This review is about the convenience, the benefits, as well as the destructive capacities of money. It deals with various aspects of money creation, with its value, and its appropriation. All sorts of money tend to get corrupted by eventually creating too much of them. In the long run, this renders money worthless and …

Spatio-temporal point process models play a central role in the analysis of spatially distributed systems in several disciplines. Yet, scalable inference remains computa- tionally challenging both due to the high resolution modelling generally required and the analytically intractable likelihood function. Here, we expl…