By analyzing a database of a questionnaire answered by a large majority of candidates and elected in a parliamentary election, we quantitatively verify that female candidates on average present political profiles which are more compassionate and more concerned with social welfare issues than male candidates and the voting procedure acts as a process of information aggregation. Our results show that information aggregation proceeds with at least two distinct paths. In the first case candidates ch

A criminal career can be either general, with the criminal commiting different types of crime, or specialized, with the criminal commiting a specific type of crime. A central problem in the study of crime specialization is to determine, from the perspective of the criminal, which crimes should be considered similar and which crimes should be considered distinct. We study a large set of Swedish suspects to empirically investigate generalist and specialist behavior in crime. We show that there is

We investigate the trading behavior of a large set of single investors trading the highly liquid Nokia stock over the period 2003-2008 with the aim of determining the relative role of endogenous and exogenous factors that may affect their behavior. As endogenous factors we consider returns and volatility, whereas the exogenous factors we use are the total daily number of news and a semantic variable based on a sentiment analysis of news. Linear regression and partial correlation analysis of data

We empirically study the trading activity in the electronic on-book segment and in the dealership off-book segment of the London Stock Exchange, investigating separately the trading of active market members and of other market participants which are non-members. We find that (i) the volume distribution of off-book transactions has a significantly fatter tail than the one of on-book transactions, (ii) groups of members and non-members can be classified in categories according to their trading profile

We use a self-averaging measure called Kullback-Leibler divergence to evaluate the performance of four different correlation estimators: Fourier, Pearson, Maximum Likelihood and Hayashi-Yoshida estimator. The study uses simulated transaction prices for a large number of stocks and different data generating mechanisms, including synchronous and non-synchronous transactions, homogeneous and heterogeneous inter-transaction time. Different distributions of stock returns, i.e. multivariate Normal an

We empirically study the trading activity in the electronic on-book segment and in the dealership off-book segment of the London Stock Exchange, investigating separately the trading of active market members and of other market participants which are non-members. We find that (i) the volume distribution of off-book transactions has a significantly fatter tail than the one of on-book transactions, (ii) groups of members and non-members can be classified in categories according to their trading profile

We use a self-averaging measure called Kullback-Leibler divergence to evaluate the performance of four different correlation estimators: Fourier, Pearson, Maximum Likelihood and Hayashi-Yoshida estimator. The study uses simulated transaction prices for a large number of stocks and different data generating mechanisms, including synchronous and non-synchronous transactions, homogeneous and heterogeneous inter-transaction time. Different distributions of stock returns, i.e. multivariate Normal an

We investigate the daily correlation present among market indices of stock exchanges located all over the world in the time period Jan 1996 - Jul 2009. We discover that the correlation among market indices presents both a fast and a slow dynamics. The slow dynamics reflects the development and consolidation of globalization. The fast dynamics is associated with critical events that originate in a specific country or region of the world and rapidly affect the global system. We provide evidence th

We use statistically validated networks, a recently introduced method to validate links in a bipartite system, to identify clusters of investors trading in a financial market. Specifically, we investigate a special database allowing to track the trading activity of individual investors of the stock Nokia. We find that many statistically detected clusters of investors show a very high degree of synchronization in the time when they decide to trade and in the trading action taken. We investigate

We introduce a new statistical test of the hypothesis that a balanced panel of firms have the same growth rate distribution or, more generally, that they share the same functional form of growth rate distribution. We applied the test to European Union and US publicly quoted manufacturing firms data, considering functional forms belonging to the Subbotin family of distributions. While our hypotheses are rejected for the vast majority of sets at the sector level, we cannot reject them at the subse