相关论文: From Sicilian mafia to Chinese "scam villages"
We study a set of high-profile scams that were well engineered and have hit people hard in China in recent years. We propose a simple but novel theoretical framework to examine psychological, situational and social fabric factors that have…
This chapter develops a feedback economic model that explains the rise of the Sicilian mafia in the 19th century. Grounded in economic theory, the model incorporates causal relationships between the mafia activities, predation, law…
In this article, the relationship between two well-accepted empirical propositions regarding the distribution of population in cities, namely, Gibrat's law and Zipf's law, are rigorously examined using the Chinese census data. Our findings…
In this article we study the organizational structure of a large group of members of the Sicilian Mafia by means of social network analysis and an econometric analysis of link formation. Our mains results are the following. i) The Mafia…
A new form of human trafficking has emerged across Chinese borders, where individuals are lured to Southeast Asia with fraudulent job offers and then coerced into operating online scams. Despite its massive economic and human toll, this…
It is estimated that Italian Mafias registered 135 billion euros in profits only in 2010. Part of this huge amount of money, coming mostly from the drugs, prostitution and arms illicit markets, is often used to invest into legitimate…
In this paper we present the results of the study of Sicilian Mafia organization by using Social Network Analysis. The study investigates the network structure of a Mafia organization, describing its evolution and highlighting its…
This is the first study to explore the transmission paths for liquidity shocks in China's segmented money market. We examine how money market transactions create such pathways between China's closely-guarded banking sector and the rest of…
Compared to other types of social networks, criminal networks present hard challenges, due to their strong resilience to disruption, which poses severe hurdles to law-enforcement agencies. Herein, we borrow methods and tools from Social…
The yearly aggregated tax income data of all, more than 8000, Italian municipalities are analyzed for a period of five years, from 2007 to 2011, to search for conformity or not with Benford's law, a counter-intuitive phenomenon observed in…
The latest global financial tsunami and its follow-up global economic recession has uncovered the crucial impact of housing markets on financial and economic systems. The Chinese stock market experienced a markedly fall during the global…
Focusing on the telecom manufacturing industry in China, this paper contends that the existing literature needs to be expanded in order to explain the Chinese case. First, product cycle theory could be applied to explain multinational…
Online fraud substantially harms individuals and seniors are disproportionately targeted. While family is crucial for seniors, little research has empirically examined how they protect seniors against fraud. To address this gap, we employed…
Containing the spreading of crime in urban societies remains a major challenge. Empirical evidence suggests that, left unchecked, crimes may be recurrent and proliferate. On the other hand, eradicating a culture of crime may be difficult,…
Global financial systems are undergoing strategic shifts as geopolitical tensions reshape international trade and payments. The United States (US)-China trade war, sanctions regimes, and rising concerns over the weaponization of financial…
Real estate projects are developed excessively in China in this decade. Many new housing districts are built, but they far exceed the actual demand in some cities. These cities with a high housing vacancy rate are called ghost cities. The…
The shift toward high-quality urbanization has brought increased attention to the issue of "urban villages", which has become a prominent social problem in China. However, there is a lack of available geospatial data on urban villages,…
This paper extends endogenous economic growth models to incorporate knowledge externality. We explores whether spatial knowledge spillovers among regions exist, whether spatial knowledge spillovers promote regional innovative activities,…
This paper discusses the size distribution, - in economic terms - of the Italian municipalities over the period 2007-2011. Yearly data are rather well fitted by a modified Lavalette law, while Zipf-Mandelbrot-Pareto law seems to fail in…
In this work, the topologies of networks constructed from time series from an underlying system undergo a period doubling cascade have been explored by means of the prevalence of different motifs using an efficient computational motif…