Who Is Controlling the World? Analysis of Economic Networks

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Title: "Who Is Controlling the World? Analysis of Economic Networks"

by

Mr. TU, Jia

Abstract:

The financial crisis that erupted in 2008 has made plain the shortcomings
of old paradigms in economics and finance. Researchers have turned to
other disciplines to seek for fresh insights.  Network science has thus
made its way into economics, with financial institution as nodes, linked
by their mutual iterations, be it trade, ownership, R&D alliance or other
interactions.

In this project, we constructed a financial network with economic actors
as nodes and stock ownership as edges. With data from New York stock
markets and Hong Kong markets, we firstly recognize the network structure
of each market and then applied some mathematical models to compute
the control value of each entity. After that, we ranked the economic
actors with their control values and computed the correlation with market
indicators to teste our hypothesis that the entity with larger control
value would have larger influence over the market in the way that the
variation of its stock price can be reflected more explicitly in the stock
indices than those have weak control holders.

Date            :       8 May 2014 (Thu)

Time            :       6:00pm to 7:00pm

Venue           :       5505 (lift 25)

Advisor         :       Dr. Pan HUI

2nd Reader      :       Prof. James T. Y. KWOK