The Political Economist

A paper of mine (co-authored with Boris Podobnik and H. Eugene Stanley ) got published in PLOS ONE ! Since PLOS is an open-access journal you can read the whole paper here . It is primarily a theoretical paper focused on designing a model of corruption networks in democracies. The intuition for the model was a growing disparity between public sector and private sector wages and how this corresponds with greater corruption. This is, naturally, only a correlation, but it served as a motivation to search deeper and uncover how corrupt networks can sustain themselves within a democratic environment.  There were three main findings/contributions in the paper: The greater the public sector wage premium (higher public sector wages than private sector wages) in a given country, the greater the possibility of corruption We design and propose a new reward-to-risk ratio for labor economics (taking into account the relative riskiness of working in each sector) Democracy does not ...

Over the past two weeks, in the same schedule as always, we had the opportunity to enjoy the announcements of Nobel prize winners. Last but not least was the Nobel prize in economics (or to be more precise for all those doubters out there, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Albert Nobel). And once again the prize went into well-deserved hands. Angus Deaton from Princeton University , a brilliant academic with a distinguished career and list of contributions (recently a member of the National Academy of Sciences ), a global fighter against poverty and inequality, and above all an economist with an eye for applicability of his research. What is surprising is that once again, the same as last year , the prize was awarded to a single recipient (a rare occurrence in the past 15 years in this field). However what hardly came as a surprise was the field of research that was finally acknowledged with a Nobel prize - inequality and development, for the first time si...