1,721,023 research outputs found

    Systemic liquidity contagion in the European interbank market

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    Systemic liquidity risk, defined by the International Monetary Fund as “the risk of simultaneous liquidity difficulties at multiple financial institutions,” is a key topic in financial stability studies and macroprudential policy-making. In this context, the complex web of interconnections of the interbank market plays the crucial role of allowing funding liquidity shortages to propagate between financial institutions. Here, we introduce a simple yet effective model of the interbank market in which liquidity shortages propagate through an epidemic-like contagion mechanism on the network of interbank loans. The model is defined by using aggregate balance sheet information of European banks, and it exploits country and bank-specific risk features to account for the heterogeneity of financial institutions. Moreover, in order to obtain the European- wide topology of the interbank network, we define a block reconstruction method based on the exchange flows between the various countries. We show that the proposed contagion model is able to estimate systemic liquidity risk across different years and countries. Results suggest that our effective contagion approach can be successfully used as a viable alternative to more realistic but complicated models, which not only require more specific balance sheet variables with high time resolution but also need assumptions on how banks respond to liquidity shocks

    Geography of science: competitiveness and inequality

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    We characterize the temporal dynamics of Scientific Fitness, as defined by the Economic Fitness and Complexity (EFC) framework, and R&D expenditures at the geographic scale of nations. Our analysis highlights common patterns across similar research systems, and shows how develop-ing nations (China in particular) are quickly catching up with the developed world. This paints the picture of a general growth of scientific and technical capabilities of nations induced by the spreading of information typical of the scientific environment. Shifting the focus of the analysis to the regional level, we find that even developed nations display a considerable level of inequal-ity in the Scientific Fitness of their internal regions. Further, we assess comparatively how the competitiveness of each geographic region is distributed over the spectrum of research sectors. Overall, the Scientific Fitness represents the first high quality estimation of the scientific strength of nations and regions, opening new policy-making applications for better allocating resources, filling inequality gaps and ultimately promoting innovation

    Essentiality, conservation, evolutionary pressure and codon bias in bacterial genes

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    Essential genes constitute the core of genes which cannot be mutated too much nor lost along the adaptive evolutionary history of a species. Natural selection is expected to be stricter on essential genes and on conserved (highly shared) genes, than on genes that are either nonessential or peculiar to a single or a few species. In order to further assess this expectation, we study here how essentiality of a gene is connected with its degree of conservation among several unrelated bacterial species, each one characterised by its own codon usage bias. Confirming previous results on E- Coli, we show the existence of a universal exponential correlation between gene essentiality and conservation in bacteria. Moreover, we show that, within each bacterial genome, there are at least two groups of functionally distinct genes, characterised by different levels of conservation and codon bias: i) a core of essential genes, mainly related to cellular information processing; ii) a set of less conserved genes with prevalent functions related to metabolism. The genes in the first group are more retained among species, are subject to a relatively purifying conservative selection and display a more selected choice of synonymous codons.The core of essential genes is close to the minimal bacterial genome, which is in the focus of recent studies in synthetic biology, though we confirm that othologues of genes that are essential in one species are not necessarily essential in other species. We also list a set of highly shared genes, which could constitute a reservoir of targets for new anti-microbial drugs

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods

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