Archives

bookmark_borderNew paper on identifying Offshore Financial Centers using Network Science

Posted on by frank

Our paper on a new data-driven network-based method to identify offshore financial centers is out in Scientific Reports. Using a dataset consisting of over 70 million ownership relations between firms across the world, we identify countries that are disproportionately involved as sinks and conduits of value in the global corporate ownership network. The research sheds light on topics such as tax evasion, providing the most fine-grained insight in offshore finance to date. Also see the related article in The Guardian as well as Tweede Kamer (dutch parliament) questions and the ministry’s answers.

 

bookmark_borderBoundingDiameters algorithm implemented in Python NetworkX

Posted on by frank

In 2011, I devised together with colleague Walter Kosters a new algorithm to efficiently compute the diameter (and radius, core and periphery) of small world networks. It has been available for reuse for a few years as part of the teexGraph package, and I am happy to see that this algorithm is now also part of the master branch of the latest version of NetworkX, an extensive and frequently used Python package for network analysis. Happy computing!

 

bookmark_borderFaculty Award for Teaching 2016

Posted on by frank

I was pleasantly surprised to receive the “Teacher of the Year 2016” award from the Faculty of Science of Leiden University. I gratefully thank the students who nominated me, as well as those who have chosen to finally elect me as the winner. If you have any suggestions as to how I can spend the EUR 2500 associated with this award on teaching-related activities, let me know!

 

bookmark_borderNetwork Science upcoming conferences

Posted on by frank

I made a list of interesting conferences to possibly attend given my interest in network science / complex networks from a computational point of view, with applications in computational social science, and occasionally economics; sometimes together referred to as socio-economics.

Some conferences are more oriented towards computer science, whereas others lean towards physics (complex networks/systems), economics/finance or social science (social network analysis / computational social science).

Below are conferences without proceedings (stopped keeping track of these as of 2018 for reasons of time, sorry!)

Although it started as a static one-time list, I now occasionally update these lists. Corrections or suggestions? Let me know!

bookmark_borderSymposium: Role of the Netherlands in offshore finance

Posted on by frank

With the UvA CORPENT group we are organzing a mini-symposium for academics, journalists and ngo’s at SPUI25 in Amsterdam. The event relates to our recent work on corporate ownership networks in which we found that the Netherlands is the largest foreign investment conduit in the world, i.e., the Netherlands is used by multinationals to invest in other countries, and to transfer profits across their corporate structures. Registration is required.