Nonlinear country-heterogenous impact of the Indian Ocean Dipole on global economies.

A positive Indian Ocean Dipole features an anomalously high west-minus-east sea surface temperature gradient along the equatorial Indian Ocean, affecting global extreme weathers. Whether the associated impact spills over to global economies is unknown. Here, we develop a nonlinear and country-heterogenous econometric model, and find that a typical positive event causes a global economic loss that increases for further two years after an initial shock, inducing a global loss of hundreds of billion US dollars, disproportionally greater to the developing and emerging economies.

Australia is 'free to choose' economic growth and falling environmental pressures.

Over two centuries of economic growth have put undeniable pressure on the ecological systems that underpin human well-being. While it is agreed that these pressures are increasing, views divide on how they may be alleviated. Some suggest technological advances will automatically keep us from transgressing key environmental thresholds; others that policy reform can reconcile economic and ecological goals; while a third school argues that only a fundamental shift in societal values can keep human demands within the Earth's ecological limits.

Understanding Human Mobility from Twitter.

Understanding human mobility is crucial for a broad range of applications from disease prediction to communication networks. Most efforts on studying human mobility have so far used private and low resolution data, such as call data records. Here, we propose Twitter as a proxy for human mobility, as it relies on publicly available data and provides high resolution positioning when users opt to geotag their tweets with their current location.

Oil, Gas and Conflict: A Mathematical Model for the Resource Curse.

Oil and natural gas are highly valuable natural resources, but many countries with large untapped reserves suffer from poor economic and social-welfare performance. This conundrum is known as the resource curse. The resource curse is a result of poor governance and wealth distribution structures that allow the elite to monopolize resources for self-gain.