Recommended economic studies

1. Negative interest rates: absolutely everything you need to know (Source WEF).
2. Digital music’s Asian beat (Source McKinsey Quarterly): The heady growth of new music-streaming services in the region may contain lessons for other industries.
3. Predictability in Network Models (Source R-bloggers): Network models have become a popular way to abstract complex systems and gain insights into relational patterns among observed variables in almost any area of science. The majority of these applications focuses on analyzing the structure of the network. However, if the network is not directly observed (Alice and Bob are friends) but estimated from data (there is a relation between smoking and cancer), we can analyze – in addition to the network structure – the predictability of the nodes in the network. That is, we would like to know: how well can an arbitrarily picked node in the network predicted by all remaining nodes in the network?
4. The link between democracy and economic growth (Source VOX): In summary, we show that a further examination into genuine endogeneity considerations indicates that, contrary to recent findings, democracy unfortunately does not seem to be the key to unlocking economic growth. Of course, this cautionary reality applies in reverse, too. While democracy does not seem to be the key to unlocking economic growth, it would be a mistake to conclude that an autocratic or dictatorial regime would fare any better. In other words, the form of government has little bearing on economic prosperity.