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    Bilateral Trade Agreements and the Interconnectedness of Global Trade
    (Lausanne : Frontiers Media, 2018) Maluck, Julian; Glanemann, Nicole; Donner, Reik V.
    Over the last decades, bilateral trade agreements (BTAs) have increased considerably in number and economic relevance. Notably, such agreements substantially affect global trade, since the reorganization of flows of goods and services has prominent impacts on the contracting countries' economies, but also on other parties that are (directly or indirectly) engaged in trade with these countries. Here, we empirically study the effect of BTAs on the input-output linkages between the contractual parties' national economic sectors by defining a new measure of Trade Interconnectedness (TI), which describes the relative importance of direct and indirect production linkages between the two countries in the international trade network. By analyzing its time evolution for each pair of trade agreement partners, we demonstrate that while most BTAs are succeeded by an increase in TI between the contractors, there are some notable exceptions. In particular, comparing the trade profiles of China and the United States (US), we find indications that both countries have been pursuing fundamentally different objectives and strategies related to the negotiation of BTAs.
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    Tracking online topics over time: understanding dynamic hashtag communities
    (New York, NY [u.a.] : Springer international, 2018) Lorenz-Spreen, Philipp; Wolf, Frederik; Braun, Jonas; Ghoshal, Gourab; Djurdjevac Conrad, Nataša; Hövel, Philipp
    Background: Hashtags are widely used for communication in online media. As a condensed version of information, they characterize topics and discussions. For their analysis, we apply methods from network science and propose novel tools for tracing their dynamics in time-dependent data. The observations are characterized by bursty behaviors in the increases and decreases of hashtag usage. These features can be reproduced with a novel model of dynamic rankings. Hashtag communities in time: We build temporal and weighted co-occurrence networks from hashtags. On static snapshots, we infer the community structure using customized methods. On temporal networks, we solve the bipartite matching problem of detected communities at subsequent timesteps by taking into account higher-order memory. This results in a matching protocol that is robust toward temporal fluctuations and instabilities of the static community detection. The proposed methodology is broadly applicable and its outcomes reveal the temporal behavior of online topics. Modeling topic-dynamics: We consider the size of the communities in time as a proxy for online popularity dynamics. We find that the distributions of gains and losses, as well as the interevent times are fat-tailed indicating occasional, but large and sudden changes in the usage of hashtags. Inspired by typical website designs, we propose a stochastic model that incorporates a ranking with respect to a time-dependent prestige score. This causes occasional cascades of rank shift events and reproduces the observations with good agreement. This offers an explanation for the observed dynamics, based on characteristic elements of online media.