Understanding the mutual relationships between information flows and social activity in society today is one of the cornerstones of the social sciences. In financial economics, the key issue in this regard is understanding and quantifying how news of all possible types (geopolitical,...

We empirically investigate temporal and cross correlations in the frequency of news reports on companies, using a unique dataset with more than 100 million news articles reported in English by around 500 press agencies worldwide for the period 2003-2009. We find, first, that the frequency of...

Why are product prices in online markets dispersed in spite of very small search costs? To address this question, we construct a unique dataset from a Japanese price comparison site, which records price quotes offered by e-retailers as well as customers’clicks on products, which occur...

We discuss a mechanism through which inversion symmetry (i.e., invariance of a joint probability density function under the exchange of variables) and Gibrat's law generate power-law distributions with different tail exponents. Using a dataset of firm size variables, that is, tangible fixed...

In this paper, we investigate the structure and evolution of customer-supplier networks in Japan using a unique dataset that contains information on customer and supplier linkages for more than 500,000 incorporated non-financial firms for the five years from 2008 to 2012. We find, first, that...

In this paper, we investigate the structure and evolution of customer-supplier networks in Japan using a unique dataset that contains information on customer and supplier linkages for more than 500,000 incorporated non-financial firms for the five years from 2008 to 2012. We find, first, that...

How can we detect real estate bubbles? In this paper, we propose making use of information on the cross-sectional dispersion of real estate prices. During bubble periods, prices tend to go up considerably for some properties, but less so for others, so that price inequality across properties...

We investigate the cross-sectional distribution of house prices in the Greater Tokyo Area for the period 1986 to 2009. We find that size-adjusted house prices follow a lognor-mal distribution except for the period of the housing bubble and its collapse in Tokyo, for which the price distribution...

We investigate the structure of global inter-firm linkages using a dataset that contains information on business partners for about 400,000 firms worldwide, including all the firms listed on the major stock exchanges. Among the firms, we examine three networks, which are based on...