Following a suggestion of Warren Weaver, we extend the Shannon model of communication piecemeal into a complex systems model in which communication is differentiated both vertically and horizontally. This model enables us to bridge the divide between Niklas Luhmann’s theory of the...

Analyzing a large data set of publications drawn from the most competitive journals in the natural and social sciences we show that research careers exhibit the broad distributions of individual achievement characteristic of systems in which cumulative advantage plays a key role. While most...

Since their emergence just a decade ago, nearly 2% of scientific research is now published by megajournals, representing a major industrial shift in the production of knowledge. Such high-throughput production stresses several aspects of the publication process, including the editorial oversight...

The US National Park System includes 63 national parks encompassing diverse environmental and tourism management regimes, together governed by the 1916 Organic Act and its dual mandate of conservation and provision of public enjoyment. However, with the introduction of transformative science...

We exploit a timely city-level panel of individual house price estimates for both small and big real-estate markets in California USA to estimate the impact of COVID-19 on the housing market. Descriptive analysis of spot house price estimates, including contemporaneous price uncertainty and...

We demonstrate that the disruption index (CD) recently applied to publication and patent citation networks (Funk et al., Management Science 2017 [1]; Park et al., Nature 2023 [2]) systematically decreases over time due to secular growth in research and patent production, following two distinct...

We exploit a panel of Zillow Inc. property valuations to estimate the excess real-estate price growth attributable to speculation triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic in three California regions. Our research design leverages the counterfactual comparison of price estimates for properties listed...