According to the leading models in modern finance, the presence of intraday lead-lag relationships between financial assets is negligible in efficient markets. With the advance of technology, however, markets have become more sophisticated. To determine whether this has resulted in an improved...

The presence of significant cross-correlations between the synchronous time evolution of a pair of equity returns is a well-known empirical fact. The Pearson correlation is commonly used to indicate the level of similarity in the price changes for a given pair of stocks, but it does not measure...

In this paper we present a new measure to investigate the functional structure of financial markets, the Sector Dominance Ratio (SDR). We study the information embedded in raw and partial correlations using random matrix theory (RMT) and examine the evolution of economic sectoral makeup on a...

Politicians world-wide frequently promise a better life for their citizens. We find that the probability that a country will increase its {\it per capita} GDP ({\it gdp}) rank within a decade follows an exponential distribution with decay constant $\lambda = 0.12$. We use the Corruption...

We analyze the daily returns of stock market indices and currencies of 56 countries over the period of 2002-2012. We build a network model consisting of two layers, one being the stock market indices and the other the foreign exchange markets. Synchronous and lagged correlations are used as...

In the current era of worldwide stock market interdependencies, the global financial village has become increasingly vulnerable to systemic collapse. The recent global financial crisis has highlighted the necessity of understanding and quantifying interdependencies among the world's economies,...

We analyze the daily returns of stock market indices and currencies of 56 countries over the period of 2002-2012. We build a network model consisting of two layers, one being the stock market indices and the other the foreign exchange markets. Synchronous and lagged correlations are used as...

The impacts of the Subprime Financial crisis resulted in generally similar decline and volatility in both developed and emerging stock markets. However, in the aftermath of the crisis, the performance of emerging economies was stronger. To investigate this phenomena, this paper seeks to gauge...