The structures of social interaction affect individual behavior and economic performance in important ways. This leads us to ask: does the architecture of social interaction exhibit particular patterns and are these patterns stable over time? We examine interaction among economists by looking at...

We study the community structure of the multi-network of commodity-specific trade relations among world countries over the 1992-2003 period. We compare structures across commodities and time by means of the normalized mutual information index (NMI). We also compare them with exogenous community...

This paper employs a weighted network analysis to study the empirical properties of the world trade web and their evolution over time. We show that most countries are characterized by weak trade links; yet, there exists a group of countries featuring a large number of strong relationships, thus...

The paper is a follow-up to an article published in Technique Financière et Developpement in 2000 (see the appendix to the hardcopy version), which portrayed the first results of a new strategy in the field of development finance implemented in South-East Europe. This strategy consists in...

A key aspect of generating new ideas is drawing from different elements of past knowledge and combining them into a new idea. In such a process, the diversity of ideas plays a central role. This paper examines the empirical question of how the internet affected the diversity of new research by...

This paper examines the small world hypothesis. The first part of the paper presents empirical evidence on the evolution of a particular world: the world of journal publishing economists during the period 1970-2000. We find that in the 1970's the world of economics was a collection of islands....

International standards have the potential to both promote and hinder international trade. Yet empirical scholarship on the standards-trade relationship has been held up due to some methodological challenges: measurement problems, varied effects, and endogeneity concerns. We are able to surmount...