Für die sogenannte Deutschland AG war eine enge Verflechtung von Personen in Aufsichtsräten und Vorständen typisch. Diese Strukturen haben sich über die Zeit kaum geändert. Dies zeigen die Autoren mit Hilfe der Netzwerkanalyse – einer Methode, die aus den Naturwissenschaften kommend immer...

Milaković, Alfarano and Lux (2010) have identified a small core of directors who are both highly central to the entire network of German corporate boards as well as closely connected among themselves. While their analysis has been based on data for the management and supervisory boards of a...

We consider the current bipartite graph of German corporate boards and identify a small core of directors who are highly central in the entire network while being densely connected among themselves. To identify the core, we compare the actual number of board memberships to a random benchmark,...

We express the idea of classical competition in a statistical equilibrium model, where the tendency for competition to equalize profit rates results in an exponential power (or Subbotin) distribution. The model supports and extends recent evidence on the Laplace distribution of growth rates in...

We derive microscopic foundations for a well-known probabilistic herding model in the agent-based finance literature. Lo and behold, the model is quite robust with respect to behavioral heterogeneity, yet structural heterogeneity, in the sense of an underlying network structure that describes...

We argue that the complex interactions of competitive heterogeneous firms lead to a statistical equilibrium distribution of firms? profit rates, which turns out to be an exponential power (or Subbotin) distribution. Moreover, we construct a diffusion process that has the Subbotin distribution as...

Kirman's ant model has been used to characterize the expectation formation of financial investors who are prone to herding. The model's original version suffers from the problem of N-dependence: its ability to replicate the statistical features of financial returns vanishes once the system size...

A growing body of literature reports evidence of social interaction effects in survey expectations. In this note, we argue that evidence in favor of social interaction effects should be treated with caution, or could even be spurious. Utilizing a parsimonious stochastic model of expectation...