Labor markets in low- and middle income countries are characterized by high levels of informality. A multitude of interventions have therefore been implemented in many countries with the objective to increase the formalization of firms and workers, including information campaigns, simplification...

This paper uses fractional integration methods to measure the degree of persistence in historical annual data on the world population over the period 1800-2016. The analysis is carried out for the original series, and also for its log transformation and its growth rate. The results indicate that...

Contagion is an extremely important topic in finance. Contagion is at the core of most major financial crises, in particular the 2008 financial crisis. Although various approaches to quantifying contagion have been proposed, many of them lack a causal interpretation. We will present a new...

We consider 1927 borrowers from 54 countries who had a credit rating by both Moody's and S&P at the end of 1998, and their subsequent default history up to the end of 2002. Viewing bond ratings as predicted probabilities of default, we consider partial orderings among competing probability...

When the global economy hit the wall in 2007-08 (i.e. sub-prime mortgage debacle in 2006 followed by the 2008 global credit mayhem, originated in the U.S. before spreading to Europe as sovereign debt crisis), an extensive research by economists, scholars and academia compared and contrasted the...

This paper analyses the world web of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) using a complex network approach. We use data of M&As to build a temporal sequence of binary and weighted-directed networks for the period 1995-2010 and 224 countries (nodes) connected according to their M&As flows (links). We...

One microscopic coronavirus has done what US sanctions, tariffs, embargoes, trade war, and the use of dollar as a weapon of economic destruction have failed to accomplish. The COVID-19 pandemic shock has caused unconceivable damage; 200,000 stolen lives in the U.S. (and close to 1 million in the...

Global warming is likely to have unimaginable disruptions in every aspect of human life by 2050 if some actions are not taken immediately to reduce its fast acceleration. Since the Industrial Revolution (1900s), the global mean surface temperature has warmed up approximately +0.8 °C (1.4 °F)...

Galvanized by the claims of Greenwood et al. in Bubbles for Fama that “a sharp price increase of an industry portfolio does not, on average, predict unusually low returns going forward”, and Fama’s quote (June, 2016) that “Statistically, people have not come up with ways of identifying...