We synthesize the financial crisis contagion literature through the gravity model from physics and test the hypothesis that the severity of contagion relates positively to trade and financial linkages but negatively to psychic distance between countries, when macroeconomic fundamentals and institutional factors are controlled. The psychic distance variable, a behavioral predictor constructed al...

The specification of a realistic dependence structure is key to the pricing of multi-name credit derivatives. We value small k th-to-default CDS baskets in the presence of asset correlation and default contagion. Using a first-passage framework, firm values are modeled as correlated geometric Brownian motions with exponential default thresholds. Idiosyncratic links between companies are incorpo...

the instrumental use of social networks has become a central tenet of international health policy and advocacy since the millennium project. in asking, ‘how to facilitate social contagion?’, karl blanchet of the london school of hygiene and tropical medicine therefore reflects not only on the recent success, but also hints to growing challenges; the tactics of partnerships, alliances and platfo...

Cooperation is essential for successful human societies. Thus, understanding how cooperative and selfish behaviors spread from person to person is a topic of theoretical and practical importance. Previous laboratory experiments provide clear evidence of social contagion in the domain of cooperation, both in fixed networks and in randomly shuffled networks, but leave open the possibility of asym...

Prenatal immune activation has been associated with increased risk of developing schizophrenia. The polyinosinic-polycytidylic acid (Poly(I:C)) mouse model replicates some of the endophenotype characteristic of this disorder but the social deficits observed in schizophrenia patients have not been well studied in this model. Therefore we aimed to investigate social behavior, in particular emotio...

A copula models the relationships between variables independently of their marginal distributions. When the variables are time series, the copula may change over time. A statistical framework is suggested for tracking these changes over time. When the marginal distributions change, pre-…ltering is necessary before constructing the indicator variables on which the tracking of the copula is based...

Networks provide a ‘skeleton’ for the spread of contagions, like, information, ideas, behaviors and diseases. Many times networks over which contagions diffuse are unobserved and need to be inferred. Here we apply survival theory to develop general additive and multiplicative risk models under which the network inference problems can be solved efficiently by exploiting their convexity. Our addi...

Since the publication of “Complex Contagions and the Weakness of Long Ties” in 2007, complex contagions have been studied across an enormous variety of social domains. In reviewing this decade of research, we discuss recent advancements in applied studies of complex contagions, particularly in the domains of health, innovation diffusion, social media, and politics. We also discuss how these emp...

This work uses the stocks of the 197 largest companies in the world, in terms of market capitalization, in the financial area, from 2003 to 2012. We study the causal relationships between them using Transfer Entropy, which is calculated using the stocks of those companies and their counterparts lagged by one day. With this, we can assess which companies influence others according to sub-areas o...