Inequality in economic shock exposures across the global firm-level supply network.

For centuries, national economies have been engaging in international trade and production. The resulting international supply networks not only increase wealth for countries, but also allow for economic shocks to propagate across borders. Using global, firm-level supply network data, we estimate a country's exposure to direct and indirect economic losses caused by the failure of a company in another country.

Estimating the loss of economic predictability from aggregating firm-level production networks.

To estimate the reaction of economies to political interventions or external disturbances, input-output (IO) tables-constructed by aggregating data into industrial sectors-are extensively used. However, economic growth, robustness, and resilience crucially depend on the detailed structure of nonaggregated firm-level production networks (FPNs). Due to nonavailability of data, little is known about how much aggregated sector-based and detailed firm-level-based model predictions differ.

Monitoring supply networks from mobile phone data for estimating the systemic risk of an economy.

Remarkably little is known about the structure, formation, and dynamics of supply- and production networks that form one foundation of society. Neither the resilience of these networks is known, nor do we have ways to systematically monitor their ongoing change. Systemic risk contributions of individual companies were hitherto not quantifiable since data on supply networks on the firm-level do not exist with the exception of a very few countries.

Quantifying firm-level economic systemic risk from nation-wide supply networks.

Crises like COVID-19 exposed the fragility of highly interdependent corporate supply networks and the complex production processes depending on them. However, a quantitative assessment of individual companies' impact on the networks' overall production is hitherto non-existent. Based on a unique value added tax dataset, we construct the firm-level production network of an entire country at an unprecedented granularity and present a novel approach for computing the economic systemic risk (ESR) of all firms within the network.

Behavioral gender differences are reinforced during the COVID-19 crisis.

Behavioral gender differences have been found for a wide range of human activities including the way people communicate, move, provision themselves, or organize leisure activities. Using mobile phone data from 1.2 million devices in Austria (15% of the population) across the first phase of the COVID-19 crisis, we quantify gender-specific patterns of communication intensity, mobility, and circadian rhythms.

Large tunable valley splitting in edge-free graphene quantum dots on boron nitride.

Coherent manipulation of the binary degrees of freedom is at the heart of modern quantum technologies. Graphene offers two binary degrees: the electron spin and the valley. Efficient spin control has been demonstrated in many solid-state systems, whereas exploitation of the valley has only recently been started, albeit without control at the single-electron level.