Economics articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    The systemic risk of real-world financial networks is understudied. Here the authors focused on the guarantee network among Chinese firms and found that the global financial crisis during 2007-2008 and economic policies in the aftermath had significant influence on the evolution of guarantee network structure.

    • Yingli Wang
    • , Qingpeng Zhang
    •  & Xiaoguang Yang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Scholars have long argued for the central role of agency—the size of one’s opportunity set—in the human experience, but there has been little work on how a sense of agency affects behavior. We demonstrate that increasing agency leads to greater patience and risk tolerance, even if these new opportunities are not exercised.

    • Ayelet Gneezy
    • , Alex Imas
    •  & Ania Jaroszewicz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is generally difficult to scale derived estimates and understand the accuracy across locations for passively-collected data sources, such as mobile phones and satellite imagery. Here the authors show that their trained deep learning models are able to explain 70% of the variation in ground-measured village wealth in held-out countries, outperforming previous benchmarks from high-resolution imagery with errors comparable to that of existing ground data.

    • Christopher Yeh
    • , Anthony Perez
    •  & Marshall Burke

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Little is known about decentralized institutions that could facilitate cooperation for the sake of future generations. Here, the authors show that allowing for peer punishment within a generation is only partially successful in facilitating cooperation for the sake of later generations.

    • Johannes Lohse
    •  & Israel Waichman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phenomena like imitation, herding and positive feedbacks in the complex financial markets characterize the emergence of endogenous instabilities, which however is still understudied. Here the authors show that the graph-based approach is helpful to timely recognize phases of increasing instability that can drive the system to a new market configuration.

    • Alessandro Spelta
    • , Andrea Flori
    •  & Fabio Pammolli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Natural hazards can have huge impacts on individuals and societies, however, monitoring the economic recovery in the aftermath of extreme events remains a challenge. Here, the authors find that Facebook posting activity of small businesses can be used to monitor post-disaster economic recovery, and can allow local governments to better target distribution of resources.

    • Robert Eyre
    • , Flavia De Luca
    •  & Filippo Simini

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Partners who actually reduce global emissions can be penalized under carbon accounting methods based on production or consumption give an idea of responsibility. Here the authors propose a new framework, emission responsibility allotment that penalizes/credits those that increase/decrease global emissions.

    • Erik Dietzenbacher
    • , Ignacio Cazcarro
    •  & Iñaki Arto

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There are concerns that expansion of marine protected areas could have negative effects on the fishing industry. Here Lynham et al. demonstrate that the expansion of two of the world’s largest protected areas did not have a negative impact on catch rates in the Hawaii longline fishery.

    • John Lynham
    • , Anton Nikolaev
    •  & Juan Carlos Villaseñor-Derbez

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Relative economic benefits of achieving temperature targets have not properly accounted for damages at higher temperatures. Here the authors integrate dynamic cost-benefit analysis with a damage-cost curve and show that the Paris Climate Agreement constitutes the economically optimal policy pathway for the future.

    • Nicole Glanemann
    • , Sven N. Willner
    •  & Anders Levermann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Household income is used as a marker of socioeconomic position, a trait that is associated with better physical and mental health. Here, Hill et al. report a genome-wide association study for household income in the UK and explore its relationship with intelligence in post-GWAS analyses including Mendelian randomization.

    • W. David Hill
    • , Neil M. Davies
    •  & Ian J. Deary

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Based on a strategic network formation model, the authors develop game-theoretical and statistical methods to infer individuals’ incentives in complex social networks, and validate their findings in real-world, historical data sets.

    • Nicolò Pagan
    •  & Florian Dörfler

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Parks have a previously unquantified economic value attributable to mental health, a health services value. Here, the authors proposed three methods to estimate this, and applied one of these methods to show that this value is at least US$6 trillion per annum worldwide.

    • Ralf Buckley
    • , Paula Brough
    •  & Neil Harris

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Questions related to human altruism are often studied through self-reported behavior or by measuring behavior in laboratory experiments. Here, the authors examine real-world prosocial behavior using charitable donations made online.

    • Matthew R. Sisco
    •  & Elke U. Weber

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Supply demand equilibria in modern macroeconomic theories do not hold during recessionary shocks. Here the authors developed a non-equilibrium theory for the susceptibility of industrial sectors to shocks and showed these susceptibilities vary across countries, sectors and time and full economic recovery may take six to ten years.

    • Peter Klimek
    • , Sebastian Poledna
    •  & Stefan Thurner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Building an economically healthy fishing industry that supports participating communities is challenging and requires consistent performance measures. Here the authors compare the performance of world’s major tuna fisheries and find large differences, primarily in post-harvest sector benefits.

    • Jessica K. McCluney
    • , Christopher M. Anderson
    •  & James L. Anderson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans are often inconsistent when choosing between alternatives, but the neural basis of deviations from economic rationality is unclear. Here, the authors show that irrational choices arise in the same brain regions responsible for value computation, implying that brain ‘noise’ may underlie inconsistency.

    • Vered Kurtz-David
    • , Dotan Persitz
    •  & Dino J. Levy

  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    How can scientists and policymakers work together to reduce the health impacts of air pollution? In this review paper, the authors discuss the interplay between advances in environmental exposure assessment and policy advances to tackle pollution in a focused way.

    • Andrew Caplin
    • , Masoud Ghandehari
    •  & George Thurston

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Resource sharing over peer-to-peer technological networks is emerging as economically important, yet little is known about how people choose to share in this context. Here, the authors introduce a new game to model sharing, and test how players form sharing strategies depending on technological constraints.

    • Hirokazu Shirado
    • , George Iosifidis
    •  & Nicholas A. Christakis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Traditional studies of subjective well-being explain national differences using social and economic proxy variables. Here the authors build on this approach to estimate how global human well-being might evolve over the next three decades, and find that changes in social factors could play a much larger role than changes in economic outcomes.

    • Christopher Barrington-Leigh
    •  & Eric Galbraith

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Strong positive and strong negative reciprocators reward cooperation and punish defection, respectively, regardless of future benefits. Here, Weber and colleagues demonstrate that dispositions towards strong positive and strong negative reciprocity are not correlated within individuals.

    • Till O. Weber
    • , Ori Weisel
    •  & Simon Gächter

  • Article
    | Open Access

    China has entered a new normal phase of economic development with a changing role in global trade. Here the authors show that emissions embodied in China’s exports declined from 2007 to 2012, while developing countries become the major destinations of China’s export emissions.

    • Zhifu Mi
    • , Jing Meng
    •  & Klaus Hubacek

  • Article
    | Open Access

    International and domestic interprovincial trade of China are entangled, but their health impacts have been treated separately in earlier studies. Here Wang. quantify the complex impacts of trade on public health across China within an integrative framework.

    • Haikun Wang
    • , Yanxu Zhang
    •  & Michael B. McElroy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Punishment by peers can enforce social norms, such as contributing to a public good. Here, Abbink and colleagues show that individuals will enforce norms even when contributions reduce the net benefit of the group, resulting in the maintenance of wasteful contributions.

    • Klaus Abbink
    • , Lata Gangadharan
    •  & John Thrasher

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Knowledge of payoffs has been assumed to be weakly beneficial for the emergence of cooperation between humans. Here the authors provide evidence to the contrary, showing that during interactions in a competitive environment access to information about payoffs leads to less cooperative behaviour.

    • Steffen Huck
    • , Johannes Leutgeb
    •  & Ryan Oprea

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The spread of instabilities in financial systems, similarly to ecosystems, is influenced by topological features of the underlying network structures. Here the authors show, independently of specific financial models, that market integration and diversification can drive the system towards instability.

    • Marco Bardoscia
    • , Stefano Battiston
    •  & Guido Caldarelli

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