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 Internet is known to have had a powerful impact on on-line retailer strategies in markets characterised by long-tail distribution of sales. Such retailers can exploit the long tail of the market, since they are effectively without physical limit on the number of choices on offer. Here we...

The American economy can be thought of as a highly connected random network in terms of both its technological and informational connections. The cumulative size of economic recessions, the fall in output from peak to trough, is analysed for the US economy 1900-2002. A least squares fit of an...

Both theoretical and applied economics have a great deal to say about many aspects of the firm, but the literature on the extinctions, or demises, of firms is very sparse. We use a publicly available data base covering some 6 million firms in the US and show that the underlying statistical...

I examine global recessions as a cascade phenomenon. In other words, how recessions arising in one or more countries might percolate across a network of connected economies. A heterogeneous agent based model is set up in which the agents are Western economies. A country has a probability of...

We describe an exercise of using Big Data to predict the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index, a widely used indicator of the state of confidence in the US economy. We carry out the exercise from a pure ex ante perspective. We use the methodology of algorithmic text analysis of an archive of...

We combine forward investment performance processes and ambiguity averse portfolio selection. We introduce the notion of robust forward criteria which addresses the issues of ambiguity in model specification and in preferences and investment horizon specification. It describes the evolution of...

In quantitative finance, we often model asset prices as a noisy Ito semimartingale. As this model is not identifiable, approximating by a time-changed Levy process can be useful for generative modelling. We give a new estimate of the normalised volatility or time change in this model, which...

This paper presents the first empirical assessment of the causal relationship between social capital and health in Italy. The analysis draws on the 2000 wave of the Multipurpose Survey on Household conducted by the Italian Institute of Statistics on a representative sample of the population (n =...

In this study, we examine how the rice futures market in prewar Japan evolved in light of changes in market efficiency over time. Using a non-Bayesian time-varying VAR model, we compute the time-varying degree of market efficiency of the rice futures exchanges in Tokyo and Osaka. Then, we...