Феномен лідируючих позицій фондового ринку Китаю у групі країн БРІК

У статті розглядаються актуальні питання розвитку фондового ринку Китаю як лідера зростання серед інших країн БРІК. Аналізується вплив фундаментальних факторів, а також світової кон’юнктури на китайський фондовий ринок та його інвесторів.В статье рассматриваются актуальные вопросы развития фондового рынка Китая как лидера роста среди других стран БРИК. Анализируется влияние фундаментальных факторов, а также мировой конъюнктуры на китайский фондовый рынок и его инвесторов.Topical issues of Chinese stock market development as a champion among other BRIC countries are examined in the article. Influence of fundamental factors as well as world market conjuncture for Chinese stock market and its investors are analyzed

Whom do we lose? The case of dissimilarity in personal networks

Previous research finds that individuals tend to form ties with similar others much more often than with dissimilar others. However, we know relatively little about tie loss and to what extent this is driven by (dis)similarity. In this paper, we argue that ties to persons who are dissimilar with regard to gender, age, ethnicity, and education are lost faster than ties to similar persons – and we test three explanations for this faster decay of ties with dissimilar others: lack of meeting opportunities, preferences for similarity, and lower network embeddedness. To test these explanations, we analysed two waves of the Survey on the Social Networks of the Dutch (SSND, 2007, 2014). These SSND-waves contain comprehensive longitudinal panel data on ego networks of 441 respondents, who were interviewed about a wide range of relationships, their alters’ sociodemographic characteristics, where and when they met their alters, as well as how and whether they maintain these relationships. We modelled tie loss by event history analyses. Results show that ties to persons who were dissimilar are more likely to be lost faster, and that tie loss occurs mostly in the early years of a relationship. However, meeting opportunities, preferences for similarity, and network embeddedness are unable to explain why ties to dissimilar others are lost faster. We conclude that dissimilarity is a powerful driver of tie loss, and that more arguments and research are needed to fully understand the underlying mechanisms

An Exploration of Fetish Social Networks and Communities

Online Social Networks (OSNs) provide a venue for virtual interactions and relationships between individuals. In some communities, OSNs also facilitate arranging offline meetings and relationships. FetLife, the world’s largest anonymous social network for the BDSM, fetish and kink communities, provides a unique example of an OSN that serves as an interaction space, community organizing tool, and sexual market. In this paper, we present a first look at the characteristics of European members of Fetlife, comprising 504,416 individual nodes with 1,912,196 connections. We looked at user characteristics in terms of gender, sexual orientation, and preferred role. We further examined the homophilic communities and find that women in particular are far more platonically involved on the site than straight males. Our results suggest there are important differences between the FetLife community and conventional OSNs

Friendship Network Composition and Subjective Wellbeing

Using data from the UK Community Life Survey, we present the first study to examine the relationship between heterogeneity in one’s friendship network and subjective wellbeing. We measure network heterogeneity by the extent to which one’s friends are similar to oneself with regard to ethnicity and religion. We find that people who have friendship networks with characteristics dissimilar to themselves have lower levels of subjective wellbeing. Specifically, our two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimates, using measures of ethnic and religious diversity based on the Herfindahl-type fractionalization index that are flipped between adjoining rural/urban areas as instruments, suggest that a standard deviation increase in the proportion of one’s friends from different ethnic (religious) groups is associated with a decrease of 0.276 (0.451) standard deviations in subjective wellbeing