nep-net New Economics Papers
on Network Economics
Issue of 2023‒10‒23
five papers chosen by
Alfonso Rosa García, Universidad de Murcia


  1. Optimal Inspection of Rumors in Networks By Luca P. Merlino; Nicole Tabasso
  2. Stay-at-Home Peer Mothers and Gender Norms: Short-run Effects on Educational Outcomes By Liwen Chen; Bobby W. Chung; Guanghua Wang
  3. Systemic risk in financial networks: the effects of asymptotic independence By Bikramjit Das; Vicky Fasen-Hartmann
  4. Explaining Urban Order: The Autocratic Origins of Africa's City Street Networks By Nathan, Noah
  5. Fingerprinting Bitcoin entities using money flow representation learning By Natkamon Tovanich; Rémy Cazabet

  1. By: Luca P. Merlino (University of Antwerp and ECARES, Université libre de Bruxelles); Nicole Tabasso (Department of Economics, University Of Venice CÃ Foscari; University of Surrey, School of Economics)
    Abstract: We study the diffusion of a true and a false message when agents are (i) biased towards one of the messages and (ii) agents are able to inspect messages for veracity. Inspection of messages implies that a higher rumor prevalence may increase the prevalence of the truth. We employ this result to discuss how a planner may optimally choose information inspection rates of the population. We find that a planner who aims to maximize the prevalence of the truth may find it optimal to allow rumors to circulate.
    Keywords: Social Networks, Rumors, Scrutiny
    JEL: D83 D85
    Date: 2022
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ven:wpaper:2022:19&r=net
  2. By: Liwen Chen (East China Normal University); Bobby W. Chung (University of South Florida); Guanghua Wang (Nanjing Audit University)
    Abstract: Increased exposure to gender-role information affects a girl's educational performance. Utilizing the classroom randomization in Chinese middle schools, we find that the increased presence of stay-at-home peer mothers significantly reduces a girl's performance in mathematics. This exposure also cultivates gendered attitudes towards mathematics and STEM professions. Long exposure, dense network, and distant parent-daughter relationship enhance peer mothers' influences. As falsification tests against unobserved confounding factors, we find that the exposure to stay-at-home peer mothers does not affect boys' performance, nor do we find that stay-at-home peer fathers affect girls' outcomes.
    Keywords: Cultural transmission, Gender identity, Gender norms, Role models
    JEL: I24 J16 Z13
    Date: 2023–10
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:usf:wpaper:2023-03&r=net
  3. By: Bikramjit Das; Vicky Fasen-Hartmann
    Abstract: Systemic risk measurements are important for the assessment of stability of complex financial systems. Empirical evidence indicates that returns from various financial assets have a heavy-tailed behavior; moreover, such returns often exhibit asymptotic tail independence, i.e., extreme values are less likely to occur simultaneously. Surprisingly, asymptotic tail independence in dimensions larger than two has received limited attention both theoretically, and as well for financial risk modeling. In this paper, we establish the notion of mutual asymptotic tail independence for general $d$-dimensions and compare it with the traditional notion of pairwise asymptotic independence. Furthermore, we consider a financial network model using a bipartite graph of banks and assets with portfolios of possibly overlapping heavy-tailed risky assets exhibiting various asymptotic tail (in)dependence behavior. For such models we provide precise asymptotic expressions for a variety of conditional tail risk probabilities and associated CoVaR measures for assessing systemic risk. We also propose an Extremal CoVaR Index (ECI) for capturing the strength of dependence between risk entities in the network. We focus particularly on two well-known dependence structures to capture risk in any general dimension: Gaussian dependence and Marshall-Olkin dependence, both of which exhibit different levels of asymptotic independence.
    Date: 2023–09
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2309.15511&r=net
  4. By: Nathan, Noah
    Abstract: I connect the political incentives of state leaders to the physical geometry of urban built environments. Drawing on a novel combination of street network data, archival maps, and satellite imagery, I test and refine classic claims that autocratic regimes seek to order urban space, rendering society more legible through the production of gridded streets. Backdating the construction of 1.5 million streets across a sample of African cities, I show that more ordered, gridded urban neighborhoods emerge under more autocratic post-colonial regimes. But rather than a conscious effort to increase society’s legibility through urban design, evidence on mechanisms is more consistent with urban order emerging as a side-effect of more general patronage strategies autocrats use to placate critical subsets of the urban population. The paper demonstrates that efforts to intervene on the built environment represent an underexplored element of both autocratic and urban politics in the developing world.
    Date: 2023–09–11
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:y4upa&r=net
  5. By: Natkamon Tovanich (CREST - Centre de Recherche en Économie et Statistique - ENSAI - Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Analyse de l'Information [Bruz] - X - École polytechnique - ENSAE Paris - École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Rémy Cazabet (DM2L - Data Mining and Machine Learning - LIRIS - Laboratoire d'InfoRmatique en Image et Systèmes d'information - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - ECL - École Centrale de Lyon - Université de Lyon - UCBL - Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 - Université de Lyon - INSA Lyon - Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon - Université de Lyon - INSA - Institut National des Sciences Appliquées - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, LIRIS - Laboratoire d'InfoRmatique en Image et Systèmes d'information - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - ECL - École Centrale de Lyon - Université de Lyon - UCBL - Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 - Université de Lyon - INSA Lyon - Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon - Université de Lyon - INSA - Institut National des Sciences Appliquées - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, IXXI - Institut Rhône-Alpin des systèmes complexes - ENS de Lyon - École normale supérieure de Lyon - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - UJML - Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3 - Université de Lyon - UCBL - Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 - Université de Lyon - INSA Lyon - Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon - Université de Lyon - INSA - Institut National des Sciences Appliquées - Inria - Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UGA - Université Grenoble Alpes)
    Abstract: Deanonymization is one of the major research challenges in the Bitcoin blockchain, as entities are pseudonymous and cannot be identified from the on-chain data. Various approaches exist to identify multiple addresses of the same entity, i.e., address clustering. But it is known that these approaches tend to find several clusters for the same actor. In this work, we propose to assign a fingerprint to entities based on the dynamic graph of the taint flow of money originating from them, with the idea that we could identify multiple clusters of addresses belonging to the same entity as having similar fingerprints. We experiment with different configurations to generate substructure patterns from taint flows before embedding them using representation learning models. To evaluate our method, we train classification models to identify entities from their fingerprints. Experiments show that our approach can accurately classify entities on three datasets. We compare different fingerprint strategies and show that including the temporality of transactions improves classification accuracy and that following the flow for too long impairs performance. Our work demonstrates that out-flow fingerprinting is a valid approach for recognizing multiple clusters of the same entity.
    Keywords: Bitcoin, Money flow, Taint analysis, Graph embedding
    Date: 2023
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04208864&r=net

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