The monthly pattern of suicides has remained a puzzle ever since it was discovered in the second half of the 19th century. In this paper we intend to “explain” not the pattern itself but rather its changes across countries and in the course of time.

We describe, document and statistically test three mechanisms by which corporations can influence or even control stock prices: (i) Parent and holding companies wield control over other publicly traded companies. (ii) Through clever management of treasury stock based on buyback programs and...

One distinctive and pervasive aspect of social systems is the fact that they involve several kinds of agents. Thus, in order to draw parallels with physical systems one is led to consider binary (or multi-component) compounds. Recent views about the mixing of liquids in solutions gained from...

Speculation not only occurs in financial markets but also in numerous other markets, e.g. commodities, real estate, collectibles, and so on. Such speculative movements result in price peaks which share many common characteristics: same order of magnitude of duration with respect to amplitude,...

Transportation costs still play an important role in the economics of commodity markets. In this paper I present a theoretical framework aimed at describing spatial arbitrage under uncertainty; I analyze the effect of changing transport costs on different, yet related, variables: volume of...

The purpose of the book is to investigate the foundations of international and interregional trade at the microeconomic level of spatially separated commodity markets. At this level, price arbitrage and local disparities in production and demand functions are the main determinants. The model,...

This volume explores the changes in speculative trading in the United States to provide an understanding of the present economic crisis. Readers will find a unified mathematical theory of speculation and new chapters that discuss neoliberalism