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This investigation sheds light on the social history of pathogenic dirt and its significance for shaping medical practices during the nineteenth century. It consists of an analysis focusing on Swedish medicine, using 8800 yearly reports written 1820-1900 by Swedish provincial doctors for the National Board of Health in Stockholm. The main argument is that the provincial doctors' perceptions of the relationship between dirt and health during this century can be better understood by focusing on similarities in the handling of different kinds of pathological dirt over the course of many decades, rather than seeing interest in cleanliness as something mostly unprecedented. A novel cleanliness regime became dominant during the latter third of the century, meant to counter a new hybrid between everyday dirt - bodily emanations from healthy bodies - and matter believed to have caused miasmatic and contagionistic disease. New ideas about filth and its impact on health played a crucial role in the development of public health and sanitation movements, and were a precondition for everyday dirt becoming a central medical problem around the turn of the twentieth century, but as is shown, they built on old precedents. Thus, the miasmatic and contagionistic approach to disease shaped conceptions of hygiene and cleanliness.

Objective: To investigate perceived changes in academic self-efficacy associated with self-reported symptoms of COVID-19, changes in mental health, and trust in universities' management of the pandemic and transition to remote education during lockdown of Swedish universities in the spring of 2020. Methods: 4495 participated and 3638 responded to self-efficacy questions. Associations were investigated using multinomial regression. Results: Most students reported self-experienced effects on self-efficacy. Lowered self-efficacy was associated with symptoms of contagion, perceived worsening of mental health and low trust in universities' capacity to successfully manage the lockdown and transition to emergency remote education. Increased self-efficacy was associated with better perceived mental health and high trust in universities. Conclusion: The initial phase of the pandemic was associated with a larger proportion of students reporting self-experienced negative effects on academic self-efficacy. Since self-efficacy is a predictor of academic performance, it is likely that students' academic performance will be adversely affected.

To evidence the impact of air pollution on the health of urban populations, several studies use natural experiments that shift commuting from public transport to cars (or vice-versa). However, as public transport use declines, reduced interpersonal contact may lead to slower virus spread and thus lower respiratory morbidity. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we show that respiratory hospitalisations are both positively affected by air pollution and negatively affected by viral spread following partial unavailability of public transport due to strikes in the ten most populated French cities during the period 2010-2015. Our results are in line with studies in other countries that have found a significant increase in urgent respiratory hospitalisations following a public transport strike, most likely due to car pollution, but we also find a detectable interaction with viral spread, which should not be overlooked when interpreting these studies., (© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Penny Dreadful is a popular horror television drama whose title clearly refers to a genre of nineteenth century popular fiction characterized by sensational and terrifying plots. The series stages an inventory of characters mainly drawn from Gothic and Victorian literature: Victor Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, Dracula, Dr Jekyll and the werewolf form a league against evil forces bent on infecting the world with a deathly plague. Among them, the two leading female characters, Vanessa Ives, a sensual, devil-possessed young woman, and Lily, Frankenstein’s female creature, epitomize the Gothic subversive heroine whose “monstrous” status and behaviour are perceived as a threat to the stability of traditional culture and society. They appear in a narration infested with images of contagion and in a “Female Gothic” literary mode which is adaptive, mutant and resistant to categorizations, thus in many ways resembling infective agents like viruses and bacteria. Significantly, the hybrid, virulent nature of these characters mirrors the traits of (Female) Gothic fiction and is analysed in the light of Discourse and Gender Studies. An example of contemporary fiction disguised under the mask of Neo-Victorianism, Penny Dreadful interprets female transgression as a vehicle of infective disruption, portraying two “pestiferous” women whose nonconformist attitude is treated medically by isolation and sanitization in order to prevent the spread of infection in a fictional world that is a frightful metaphor of our present world.

This article investigates comovement and contagions in the commodities markets. We examine the comovement by analyzing the unconditional correlation coefficients. We document that commodities tend to partially integrate. We perform contagion tests by identifying coexceedances and estimating multinomial logit to explain the joint occurrence of those coexceedances. We document that commodities price changes tend to affect the probability of both positive and negative coexceedances. Overall, we conclude that there are comovement and contagions among commodities. However, the degrees of comovement and contagion are different among commodities and between positive and negative extreme returns. The contagion among commodities is asymmetric.

This paper is the first study to examine the financial contagion from the U.S., Japanese and Chinese markets to Asian markets during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and Covid-19 Pandemic Crisis. We employ the DCC-EGARCH methodology and daily data of stock returns from 2005 to 2021 to estimate the time-varying correlations and the volatilities of stock markets. Our results show that the correlation between the U.S. and Japanese markets with emerging Asian ones is quite high, implying the interdependence between these markets. Furthermore, we find significant contagion effects from the U.S. equity market to markets in both advanced and emerging economies during the GFC. Nonetheless, during the Covid-19 pandemic, only 3 out of 10 Asian emerging markets had experienced the contagion from the U.S. Our findings also suggest that contagion effects are not strongly related to the level of global integration and Asian markets seem to be more affected by the contagion from Japan and China.

Orientation: This study investigated the relationship between the equity markets and foreign exchange markets in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS). Research purpose: This study examined the financial connectedness through volatility spillovers and co-movements among equity and foreign exchange markets in the BRICS countries to better understand market interdependencies. Motivation for the study: The literature mainly focused on volatility transmission from developed countries. Research approach: This research, used the Diebold and Yilmaz spillover index approach (DY index). The DY index is based on variance decompositions (VD) and impulse response functions that use a vector autoregressive (VAR) modelling framework. The study period was from 02 January 1997 to 31 December 2018. Main findings: Shocks from the equity markets dominate the foreign exchange markets, while foreign exchange markets dominate their equity markets at an individual level. There are interdependencies between BRICS equity markets and foreign exchange markets, except for China, whose markets are relatively isolated from other BRICS markets. Brazil is the largest contributor of volatility spillovers to other BRICS markets. The South African rand is the most integrated within BRICS. Practical implications: Foreign exchange markets provided better diversification opportunities. Significant increases in volatility spillovers associated with turmoil periods in domestic and global markets provide evidence for contagion effects in BRICS markets. Contribution: The current account (flow-oriented model) is crucial in exchange rate determination at the individual country level. In contrast, the capital account (stock-oriented model) is a significant factor in exchange rate determinations at an aggregate level.

Financial technologies (fintechs) are continuously expanding, across different markets and financial services. While financial technologies bring many opportunities, such as reduced costs and extended inclusion, they also bring risks, among which include cyber risks, that are difficult to measure. One of the difficulties that arise in the measurement of cyber risks is the interdependence among cyber losses, a problem that has not yet been solved. To fill the gap, this paper proposes a multivariate model for cyber risks, based on their observed time series of counts. The time-varying intensity parameter of the model determines the probability that a cyber attack occurs, and its specification takes not only time but also sectorial interdependence into account. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated by means of a real cyber loss dataset, in which there exists time and sectorial dependence among different events.

The purposes of the research have evidenced the spillover effects of oil-related factors in the oil market and the leading indexes of petrochemical commodities and the bulk shipping markets. The research gap was fitted and explored the effects associated with leading indexes for the shipping and petrochemical markets on the oil market during the US-China trade war, which is seldom bridged with significant relations in the history of oil. The scope of data for the period from 4 January 2016, through 31 August 2022, were analyzed using a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic mixed data sampling model as methodology of mix frequency to examine volatility spillover of four research hypotheses from the bulk shipping and petrochemical markets to the oil market. Main contributions revealed that spillover from the bulk shipping and petrochemical commodity markets transmitted significant volatility to West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil returns after the US-China trade war began, a trend that has continued throughout the COVID-19 era until Ukraine–Russia war. These rare events indicate that the realized volatility derived from these market variables can be used to track the more significant contagions on WTI futures volatility in this empirical research than the weak relation in past studies.

This paper aims to identify the main determinants of the countries that present contagion during the period 2000–2021, based on the determination of the behavior patterns of 18 stock market indices of 15 of the main economies. To do that, first, the B-spline method and Bezier curves are used to smooth observations by minimizing the noise. Subsequently, the Functional Principal Component Analysis (FPCA) methodology is applied. Then, the K-means clustering algorithm is used to determine the main groups using the silhouette method and cross-validation, considering the sum of squares of the distances as the function to minimize. Finally, classification trees and macroeconomic and financial analyses are used to determine the rules of variables that give a direct explanation of the contagion (clustering) between the stock indices. The main empirical results obtained suggest that the most significant macroeconomic variables are the Gross Domestic Product, the Consumer Price Index, and Foreign Direct Investment, while in the financial aspect and the most representative are Domestic Credit and number of companies listed on the stock market. It is worth noticing that government spending does not have a significant effect at any time as a determinant of contagion. Finally, it is important to mention, and surprising, that Mexico’s IPC was not clustered in the same group of US stock market indices anytime, despite the strong commercial relationship and the geographical closeness.

This article tests the hypothesis that all pandemics are inherently translational. We argue that translation and translation theory can be fruitfully used to understand and manage epidemics, as they help us explore concepts of infectivity and immunity in terms of cultural and biological resistance. After examining the linkage between translation and coronavirus disease from three different yet interlinked perspectives—cultural, medical, and biocultural—we make a case for a translational medical humanities framework for tackling the multifactorial crisis brought about by the SARS-CoV-2 infection. This innovative entanglement of perspectives has the merit of carving out a new space for translation research at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities, providing sustainable ways to conceptualize the production of science at times of crisis, and challenging conventional views of translation as a primarily linguistic and cultural phenomenon that traditionally does not engage with science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay theorizes the apocalyptic in three recent Latina gothic fictions. Zombie mushrooms are at the heart of the Doyle family heteropatriarchal colonial enterprise in Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic. The rabies virus is weaponized as a justification for militarized control of East LA—and in particular over the bodies of young Chicanas—at the height of the Chicano Movement in Helena Maria Viramontes's Their Dogs Came with Them. A viral apocalypse drives Carmen Maria Machado's short story "Inventory" forward across sexual and other forms of queer intimacy, leaving the narrator to wonder whether the world will spin faster without people on it. While in each of these instances tropes of contagion represent a threat against human life, viruses and mushrooms are also perfect articulations of liminality—neither clearly animal nor plant, troubling taxonomic common sense, threatening contagion and annihilation. They are biological analogues to both the wild and emancipatory queer and Chicana feminist borderlands imagined by poets and scholars alike, and this essay speculates on their theoretical possibilities as tropes of destruction and creation. The viral and the fungal represent a biotechnology of transformation that decenters liberal humanism and promises moments of apocalyptic emergence of a queer, Latina utopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Guangxi Normal University - Natural Science Edition is the property of Gai Kan Bian Wei Hui and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We propose a novel risk measure that is built on comparing high-frequency time-varying volatility and low-frequency return spillover estimates. This measure permits to identify the markets that are epidemic in their complex interdependence. We conjecture that initially a highly volatile market experiences episodes of risk transmission, but only later absorbs risk and becomes an epidemic market. Moreover, we can detect newly emerging 'contagion' in the system. We examine the behaviour of 30 global equity markets and compare spillover measures, which encapsulate many large and small crises episodes. Instead of relying on ex post crisis information, our model identifies crises periods. An important implication of the proposed approach is that highly interrelated markets, such as China, are less likely to transmit a global economic crisis under the current interdependence setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show that information frictions can help explain financial contagion among independent markets and help explain why emerging market countries are more susceptible to contagion. Costly information may cause investors to group country signals, because such imprecise signals are cheaper. These joint signals then cause asset prices to comove, which can be observed as contagion. Furthermore, this contagion channel is more likely for emerging markets than for very developed or less developed (low income) countries. This is because incentives to demand country specific information instead of joint signals are higher in developed countries as opposed to emerging markets. Furthermore, for the least developed countries, investors have a stronger incentive to not process any information, which precludes information driven contagion. We find empirical evidence for our predictions using a novel data set on the number of joint news articles and exploit variation in news due to terrorism through an Instrumental Variable approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a considerable increase in the psychopathology of COVID-19 patients and among the general population. This study aims to conduct the psychometric analysis of the scale of concern about COVID-19 in the Spanish population and to estimate the level of concern and dysfunctional anxiety present one year after the lockdown measures in Spain aimed at resisting the spread of the viral disease among the population.Methods: The factorial structure of the instrument, its reliability for the general population and for COVID patients, and its construct validity have been analyzed, and measurements of dysfunctional concern have been obtained from a sample of 502 adults.Results: The scale of concern about COVID-19 showed optimal results of reliability and validity for the Spanish population, confirming that it is an ideal instrument for estimating the concern regarding coronavirus contagion.Limitations: This study used a cross-sectional design and thus, could not compare the changes in the incidence of anxiety symptoms before and after the COVID-19 outbreak. Furthermore, the use of mental health services prior to the COVID-19 restrictions was not assessed in this study, and therefore, no comparisons between the two time points could be made.Conclusions: After a year of the confinement measures that was instilled to avoid further spread of the disease, the Spanish population presented levels of concern and anxiety that may require clinical attention, with a significant percentage of participants meeting the requirements to be diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the transmission of shocks during the period of the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union (BREXIT) across twenty-two equity markets. We use an augmented multifactor model to detect the transmission of contagion effects from the United States and Western Europe to Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, commonly known as 'the BRICS' countries, during BREXIT, i.e. the exit of Great Britain from the European Union. Our model captures the unexpected returns and disentangles the simple correlations due to fundamentals and contagion. Our results show that crisis did not have the same effects on the BRICS countries in terms of contamination. More precisely, evidence of fundamental contagion is documented between stock markets. Moreover, Russia was the most contaminated market, and China was the least affected market. Furthermore, the findings prove that the stock market contagion between these countries was transmitted by some channels that have been omitted from the theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we present a novel measurement approach for systemic risk by considering an indirect network structure. In a departure from previous studies, this measurement method captures spillovers arising from deleveraging and price impact in financial systems and calculates the amplification of losses during the contagion process. We show the relationship between a bank's vulnerability and its network connections. Applying the model to Chinese banks, we evaluate the fire-sale loss of each bank and quantify the impact of each asset in different simulated stress scenarios. Using both theoretical and empirical evidence, we show the ability of network centrality to explain systemic risk contribution: a bank with more network connections is systemically more important. We also present an optimal strategy to mitigate and govern systemic risk. Our result implies that the systemic importance of a bank is based not only on its size but also on the kinds of assets it holds; it provides useful systemic risk monitoring tools complementary to those currently used by supervisors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media reporting of celebrities' deaths by suicide are prone to suicide contagion effects. The aim of the current study is to examine whether the widely publicized celebrity suicide of Ari Behn in Norway was associated with changes in search activity of suicide-related terms. Search activity data for the terms "suicide," "Ari Behn suicide," "how to suicide," and "suicide prevention" were retrieved from Google Trends. We analyzed data as an interrupted time series and used T-tests to compare means before and after the suicide. Crude linear models examining the association between searches for "suicide" over time and an adjusted model controlling for searches after "Ari Behn suicide" were built. The models were tested with structural change tests. A significant increase in search activity for "suicide" (p = <.001), "Ari Behn suicide" (p =.002), and "how to suicide" (p =.006) was found after the suicide. Searches for "suicide prevention" were not significant (p =.11). The structural change test was significant both for the model that did not control for explicit searches (p = <.001) and for the model controlled for explicit searches (p = <.001). A recent widely publicized suicide in Norway was associated with increases in Google searches for suicide. No indications of the Papageno effect were found. The media should be cautious when reporting about the suicides of prominent public persons. Compliance with generally accepted media reporting guidelines may need more attention. We found a significant increase in search activity for suicide related terms. More attention should be devoted to careful media reporting on celebrity suicides. Media should consider the volume of publicity carefully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper characterizes a pandemic as a kind of contagion, and describes a contagion as a two-level, two-direction, reflexive feedback loop system. In such a system, expert opinions for managing a pandemic can act as self-fulfilling prophecies due to how they influence collective belief formation. However, when multiple experts produce multiple expert opinions that act as self-fulfilling prophecies, this can fragment a society’s response to a pandemic, worsening rather than ameliorating it. This paper models this possible outcome by distinguishing two competing expert opinions, appealing respectively to people in club good and common pool types of employment/health insurance situations, and argues that to combat fragmentation of opinion about how to address a pandemic, public health policy needs to attend to the nature of public reasoning. It argues this entails asking how just and legitimate deliberative institutions can function in an ‘inclusive and noncoercive’ way that allows society to reconcile competing visions regarding how to combat system-wide crises such as pandemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article charts the pandemic-engendered configurations of moviegoing cultures, leisure, and collective spectatorship in the Indian subcontinent and locates it within the discourses of personal risk, public anxiety, and industrial exclusion that have historically permeated the cinema hall. The pandemic marks a significant moment in the remaking of collective spectatorship and must be contextualized within the two-decades-long transition from single screens to multiplexes already under way in the Indian exhibition landscape. Through an account of the industrial developments in film exhibition in the last year and a half of pandemic time across two catastrophic waves of Covid-19, I offer some preliminary insights into the ways in which these shifts signal towards the cultural production of a new spectatorial body amenable to novel forms of bio-surveillance and datafication of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short piece explores what cultural theory should learn from the experience of the global pandemic. It argues that the main lesson should not be about how the crisis of the pandemic has been interpreted culturally, but about the deep social and economic inequalities which were foregrounded through the experience of 'getting by' in the pandemic, which positioned people in very different ways. So dramatic have been those inequalities, that any inherited notion of culture as something shared need to be definitively abandoned. This had already been anticipated in Ulf Hannerz's deconstruction of holistic notions of culture three decades ago, but it needs now to be acted on, as we seek to confront honestly the growing inequalities which make the normal order of everyday life possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to contagion, competing and contradictory movements emerge that engender openness to new modes of life and reactionary defenses of old ones, that acknowledge mutual dependency and vulnerability and that heighten the policing and surveillance of borders. Through reading the Empire project, this article articulates these as struggles over measure that unfold on the terrain of sovereignty and biopolitical economy. We show that the passage from modern to imperial sovereignty hinges on the former's inability to adequately impose calculatory regimes, to which the latter's flexibility and fluidity responds. This accompanies the passage from industrial to biopolitical command, from regulation through the wage to rearbitration through extractivism. Having articulated the contemporary coordinates within which the multitude finds itself, we then propose an educational weapon for the struggle against sovereignty and capital: stupidity. Turning to Jean-François Lyotard, we demonstrate just how fundamentally the rule of Empire depends on the outside of measure for its continual reproduction, and how Empire frames the communicative networks of biopolitical labor, a framing from which Hardt and Negri haven't adequately broken. As the other of thought, as that which can't be articulated, commanded, or absorbed by capital, stupidity remains totally useless and unproductive for Empire, which is exactly where its potency lies for the multitude. By critically engaging stupidity, we can refrain from reducing the pandemic to a need for heightened immunity and enclosure achieved through articulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Frontières is the property of Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Revue Frontieres and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Logos: Anales del Seminario de Metafísica (1575-6866) is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Auditor credibility is important in the banking industry due to the opacity of bank assets and the use of financial statements by external parties to facilitate monitoring. Depositors monitor and discipline bank behavior, but they can also contribute to the spread of shocks from one bank to another. We argue that depositors perceive bank failure as an audit failure, which reduces their assessment of auditor credibility. We document that exposure to failure through the audit firm is associated with lower uninsured deposit growth following the failure, consistent with depositors perceiving failures as a negative signal of auditor credibility. We further document that this association is stronger when depositors perceive connection to failure to reflect a pervasive issue within the audit firm. Collectively, our results suggest that depositors consider accounting signals at other banks in assessing financial reporting credibility. JEL Classifications: G21; M41; M42. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the correlation between different customers' loss of creditworthiness is crucial to credit risk analysis. This paper describes a novel method, based on a weighted network model, in which a set of firms, customers of the same bank, represent the nodes while their links and weights derive from the total transaction amounts. We explore the contagion mechanism deriving from the transmission of the difficulties of one customer to other clients of the same bank so highlighting areas where contagion risk is higher. We use a real proprietary data set provided by a bank to illustrate the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Latin Middle Ages, the melancholic state was described as a complex phenomenon that had both external and internal causes. Implying a set of concepts from the domains of natural philosophy, medicine, astronomy and even theology, it was seen as an affection of both the body and soul of the human being. Often enough, the main framework for explaining the affection of melancholy was confined to an internal system of corporal humoral imbalances, in which the black bile played the central role. Accordingly, the transmission of melancholy understood as illness from one individual to another, or its contagiousness, was almost an undiscussed problem. However, at the foundation of the modern concept of contagiousness lays the medieval concept of action and contact used in the etiological descriptions of different medieval illnesses. Melancholy (melancholia) and especially lovesickness (amor heroes), were two paralleling affections, often overlapping, which sometimes addressed the problem of their causes and manifestation in those terms. Focusing mainly on Constantinus Africanus" Viaticum and on Avicenna's Canon of medicine, this paper proposes to explore the conceptual interplay between melancholy and lovesickness, in order to establish the degree in which melancholy, through lovesickness, can be considered a contagious disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms contract capital expenditure, reduce new debt issuance and face a higher cost of debt following the bankruptcy of an industry peer. The spillover effect declines with industrial distance and strengthens with the saliency of the bankruptcy. Furthermore, industries that are externally financially dependent are more vulnerable to the contagion effect. The investment contraction is not driven by industry asset reallocation, the presence of distressed firms or strategic competitive behavior by peers. We establish causality by identifying idiosyncratic bankruptcies and implementing an instrumental variable estimation to mitigate the confounding effect of general industry conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We live in a world characterized by the desire for economic growth and improved living standards, by often irrational government measures, by the struggle for the re-distribution of the spheres of influence and, last but not least, by the increasing frequency and impact of economic crises. The globalization of economy has inevitably led to the globalization of crises, a phenomenon that is generating both interest and concern. The aim of this paper has been to highlight the complex issues faced by mankind, issues which create the premises for the worsening of the crises in the medium- and long-term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between oil price changes and volatility on stock market, foreign exchange rate, and gold rate, using weekly data from August 2013 to June 2021. First, using the VAR-DCC-GARCH approach, conditional correlations between markets are identified and the time series of volatility is extracted. Then, using volatility series, partial and multiple correlations in these markets are investigated using the continuous wavelet and WLMC wavelet approach. The results show that there is a correlation between markets and volatility in oil market can lead to volatility in other markets at different time horizons. The results of the WLMC estimate show that in the event of political uncertainty, WLMC has increased in the short, medium and long term.

We study a linear threshold model on a simple undirected connected network G where each non-seed becomes active if and only if the proportion of its active neighbors exceeds its adoption threshold. Each threshold function ϕ : V → [ 0 , 1 ] is viewed as a point (ϕ (v 1) , ... , ϕ (v n)) in the n -cube [ 0 , 1 ] n , where V = { v 1 , ... , v n } is the set of nodes in G. We define ϕ as a contagious point of a subset S of nodes if it can induce full contagion from S. Consequently, the volume of the set of contagious points of S in [ 0 , 1 ] n represents the probability of full contagion from S when the adoption threshold of each node is independently and uniformly distributed in [ 0 , 1 ] , which we term the contagion probability of S and denote by p c (S). We derive an explicit formula for p c (S) , showing that p c (S) is determined by how likely S can produce full contagion exclusively through each spanning tree of the quotient graph G S of G in which S is treated as a single node. Besides, we compare p c (S) with the contagion threshold of S , which is denoted by q c (S) and is the probability of full contagion from S when all nodes share a common adoption threshold q chosen uniformly at random from [ 0 , 1 ]. We show that the presence of a cycle in G S is necessary but not sufficient for p c (S) to exceed q c (S) , which indicates that allowing threshold heterogeneity may not always increase the chance of full contagion. Our framework can be extended to study contagion under various threshold settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crises severely impact economies and may spread across regions or sectors in a process called contagion. Understanding this process is crucial for anticipating crises' effects and implementing mitigative strategies. Specific economic sectors may be major crisis propagators: banking and insurance are often considered decisive in this context. This study employs Dynamic Bayesian Networks to model sectoral interdependencies within the U.S. economy, utilizing daily data from nine Dow Jones industrial indices over the period 2000–2020. As a secondary objective, we evaluate whether the insurance industry plays a central role in spreading crises. Several crisis periods are analyzed, from dot-com bubble to Covid-19 pandemic. The results reveal the subprime crisis, European debt crisis and the 2016 presidential election as the main contagious periods. The last analyzed period – Covid-19 pandemic – was divided in two phases, showing, on phase 1, an interconnected economic system with three main spreaders (Oil & Gas, Real Estate and Pharmaceutical) and, on phase 2, the same configuration of the post-subprime. Furthermore, although the insurance sector was somehow relevant during subprime crisis, it primarily acts as a contagion receptor, specially from the banking sector, with the correlation between them being the highest of all, reaching 0.49 at the last period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Restaurants are swiftly embracing automation to prepare food, experimenting with innovations from robotic arms for frying foods to pizza-making robots. While these advances promise to enhance efficiency and productivity, their impact on consumer psychology remains largely unexplored. We present four experiments that demonstrate how food service automation leads to negative downstream effects (i.e., diminished taste perceptions, decreased willingness to pay, less favorable attitudes towards food items) across multiple food categories. This stems in part from two distinct contagion effects, whereby automation appears to undermine the food's ability to contain symbolic love (positive contagion from human contact) while simultaneously increasing feelings of disgust (negative contagion from machine contact). Moreover, we highlight how communicating the consumer-oriented benefits of automation can suppress the disgust associated with automation and subsequently mitigate the deleterious effects on consumer evaluations. Our findings suggest that service retailers should consider the psychological impact on consumers when shifting away from human involvement in a category as intimate and consequential as the production of our food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is clear evidence that the prevalence of negative media reporting has increased substantially over the past years. There is evidence that this negative reporting adversely affects social interactions, and thereby also health and well-being outcomes. Given the wide reach of negative media reporting and the contagion of such reporting and the resulting interactions, the effects on health are arguably substantial. Moreover, there is little incentive at present for media outlets to change practices. A commitment of news outlets to report one positive story for every 3 negative stories, and of news consumers to restrict attention to outlets that do, could dramatically alter practices and, consequently, population health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]