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Centre

Centre for Social and Economic Network Analysis (SENA)

Part of Department of Economics

Lots of different coloured plastic chess pieces on a board with straight pencil lines connecting them.

We are a multi-disciplinary group for the study of networks

We are the focal point of network research at the University of Essex. We aim to increase the visibility of network research, within the academic community and beyond.

Networks have become an exciting term associated to research with major impact, media coverage and student interest in a variety of fields. Network analysis is naturally interdisciplinary. Typical networks that underlie social science phenomena include friendships among individuals, innovation spill over across firms, input-output production linkages and supply chains, international trade flows, and over-the-counter trades between banks. Studying the network effects that underlie such phenomena is often extremely complex requiring the mastery of advanced mathematical and statistical tools as well as computing tools in some cases. In fact, the common mathematical and statistical tools specific to network analysis create a natural link between social sciences and STEM sciences.

Our work capitalises on a strong base; we benefit from the established tradition of social science research already taking place at the University of Essex, as well as an excellent relationship with a growing Department of Mathematics. Furthermore, Professor Sanjeev Goyal, one the pioneers of social networks research, now at Cambridge, conducted some of his key research in the area while in the Department of Economics at Essex between 2003 and 2006.

Our members belong to a multitude of different disciplines, both within and outside of the University of Essex, view our complete list of members, visit their individual staff profiles and learn more about their research interests by visiting our members page.

"Network analysis is naturally interdisciplinary. Our members belong to a multitude of disciplines, both within and outside of the University. In such a diverse environment, new ideas flourish and lead to ground-breaking discoveries with far reaching benefits for society."

Professor Christian Ghiglino dIRECTOR cENTRE FOR sOCIAL AND eCONOMIC nETWORK aNALYSIS

Our members:

The members of the Centre for Social and Economic Network Analysis (SENA) belong to a broad range of disciplines. From political science and sociology, to mathematics and economics; our interdisciplinary collaboration ensures our research is multi-faceted and dynamic.

View the members of the Centre for Social and Economic Network Analysis

Our Directors

Professor Christian Ghiglino

Director

Department of Economics, University of Essex

Professor Ghiglino chairs the research in social identity and peer effects. His interest is in understanding the drives of other regarding behaviour, as altruism, using the tools of network analysis. As Director he has general oversight of the Centre, in particular linking the economics department with SENA.

Dr Lukas Altermatt

Deputy Director

Department of Economics, University of Essex

Dr Altermatt is active in the research area on Financial Networks and Contagion. He is interested in bringing together knowledge about modelling and understanding networks from various disciplines. He coordinates the organisation of external talks and workshops within the Centre. Contact him if you are potentially interested in joining our activities.

Our research areas:

Visit our research areas to discover more about specific research currently being undertaken at the Centre for Social and Economic Network Analysis. Each research area showcases a list of members, with links to their staff profiles and details of supervision status.

Our key aims

Bringing together researchers working on networks from across the University of Essex.
Organising multi-disciplinary internal workshops on specific themes and organising international workshops and conferences. We also apply for and obtain grants to support current research and build robust research networks for future research.
Coordinating links with local government and the industry and thus improving the impact of network research, whilst helping to sustain the quality of programs by leveraging the strengths of our research.

Highlights of our work

Publications

Class Altruism and Redistribution, co-authored by C. Ghiglino, D. Juárez-Luna and A. Müller, in the Economic Journal.
Gender Bias in Opinion Aggregation, co-authored by F. Mengel in the International Economic Review.
Early warning of systemic risk in global banking: eigen-pair R number for financial contagion and market price-based methods, co-authored by S. Markose, S. Giansante, N.A. Eterovic, M. Gatkowski et al., in the Annals of Operation Research, (2021).
Income Differences, Productivity and Input-Output Networks, co-authored by H. Fadinger, C. Ghiglino and M. Teteryatnikova, in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.
Cross-Ownership and Portfolio Choice, co-authored by A. Galeotti and C. Ghiglino in the Journal of Economic Theory.
Theory of Heterogeneous City Growth, co-authored by C. Ghiglino, K. Nishimura and A. Venditti, International Journal of Economic Theory.
Experiments on Belief Formation in Networks, co-authored by V. Grimm and F. Mengel in the Journal of the European Economic Association.
Compliance Behavior in Networks: Evidence from a Field Experiment, co-authored by F. Drago, F. Mengel and C. Traxler in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.
Extensions of the SEIR model for the analysis of tailored social distancing and tracing approaches to cope with COVID-19, co-authored by V. Grimm, F. Mengel and M. Schmidt in Scientific Reports.
A generic model for pandemics in networks of communities and the role of vaccination, co-authored by Chris G. Antonopoulos, M. H. Akrami, Vasileios Basios and Anouchah Latifi in Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, (2022).
Opinion formation in multiplex networks with general initial distributions, co-authored by Chris G. Antonopoulos & Yilun Shang in Scientific Reports, (2018).
Navigating the Range of Statistical Tools for Inferential Network Analysis, co-authored by Skyler J. Cranmer, Philip Leifeld, Scott D. McClurg and Meredith Rolfe in the American Journal of Political Science, (2017).
Polarization in the social sciences: Assortative mixing in social science collaboration networks is resilient to interventions, by Philip Leifeld in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, (2018).
Temporal Exponential Random Graph Models with btergm: Estimation and Bootstrap Confidence Intervals, co-authored by Philip Leifeld, Skyler J. Cranmer and Bruce A. Desmarais in the Journal of Statistical Software, (2018).
Information Exchange in Policy Networks, co-authored by Philip Leifeld and Volker Schneider in the American Journal of Political Science, (2012).
The Swiss StudentLife Study: Investigating the emergence of an undergraduate community through dynamic, multidimensional social network data, co-authored by András Vörösa, Zsófia Boda, Timon Elmerad, Marion Hoffman, Kieran Mepham, Isabel J. Raabee and Christoph Stadtfeld in Social Networks, (2021).

Working papers

“Loss Aversion and Conspicuous Consumption in Networks,” Y. Bramoullé and C. Ghiglino, CEPR Discussion Paper 17181, April 2022.

Events

The Centre for Social and Economic Network Analysis regularly host seminars and events.

To find out about all events currently being hosted within the Department of Economics please visit our Departmental events calendar.

A previous seminar:

Centre for Social and Economic Network Analysis Director Christian Ghiglino

University of Essex

Email: cghig@essex.ac.uk

Department of Economics Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex

CO4 3SQ

Telephone: 01206 872728