arXiv subjects

M. Riccaboni

Publications and source records attributed to M. Riccaboni.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The Innovation Recognition Paradox: How Science Undervalues the Boundary-Crossing Work Women Produce

Women and men pursue different but complementary forms of scientific innovation. Analyzing 261,452 solo-authored papers by U.S. scholars, with patterns confirmed by millions of multi-authored articles, we show that women more often bridge distant disciplines through novel reference combinations, while men more often recombine concepts within fields. Women's interdisciplinary innovations prove more disruptive and more prescient, yet science penalizes them for it. For equally innovative work, women's papers land in lower-prestige journals and tend to receive less downstream citation credit, though their disruptive impact is greater. These gaps narrow only at extreme levels of novelty, suggesting women must produce exceptionally surprising work to achieve parity. Men's within-field concept innovations, by contrast, attract recognition from disciplinary gatekeepers who control careers. The asymmetry reveals not a deficit in women's contributions but a reward structure that systematically undervalues the boundary-crossing work most likely to transform fields.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2023

Breaking Down the Lockdown: The Causal Effects of Stay-At-Home Mandates on Uncertainty and Sentiments During the COVID-19 Pandemic

We study the causal effects of lockdown measures on uncertainty and sentiment on Twitter. To this end, we exploit the quasi-experimental framework created by the first COVID-19 lockdown in a high-income economy--the unexpected Italian lockdown in February 2020. We measure changes in public sentiment using deep learning and dictionary-based methods on the text of daily tweets geolocated within and near the locked-down areas, before and after the treatment. We classify tweets into four categories--economics, health, politics, and lockdown policy--to examine how the policy affected emotions heterogeneously. Using a staggered difference-in-differences approach, we show that the lockdown did not have a significantly robust impact on economic uncertainty and sentiment. However, the policy came at the price of higher uncertainty on health and politics and more negative political sentiments. These results, which are robust to a battery of robustness tests, show that lockdowns have relevant non-health related implications.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2006

A Generalized Preferential Attachment Model for Business Firms Growth Rates: II. Mathematical Treatment

We present a preferential attachment growth model to obtain the distribution $P(K)$ of number of units $K$ in the classes which may represent business firms or other socio-economic entities. We found that $P(K)$ is described in its central part by a power law with an exponent $ϕ=2+b/(1-b)$ which depends on the probability of entry of new classes, $b$. In a particular problem of city population this distribution is equivalent to the well known Zipf law. In the absence of the new classes entry, the distribution $P(K)$ is exponential. Using analytical form of $P(K)$ and assuming proportional growth for units, we derive $P(g)$, the distribution of business firm growth rates. The model predicts that $P(g)$ has a Laplacian cusp in the central part and asymptotic power-law tails with an exponent $ζ=3$. We test the analytical expressions derived using heuristic arguments by simulations. The model might also explain the size-variance relationship of the firm growth rates.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2003

On size and growth of business firms

We study size and growth distributions of products and business firms in the context of a given industry. Firm size growth is analyzed in terms of two basic mechanisms, i.e. the increase of the number of new elementary business units and their size growth. We find a power-law relationship between size and the variance of growth rates for both firms and products, with an exponent between -0.17 and -0.15, with a remarkable stability upon aggregation. We then introduce a simple and general model of proportional growth for both the number of firm independent constituent units and their size, which conveys a good representation of the empirical evidences. This general and plausible generative process can account for the observed scaling in a wide variety of economic and industrial systems. Our findings contribute to shed light on the mechanisms that sustain economic growth in terms of the relationships between the size of economic entities and the number and size distribution of their elementary components.

cond-mat↗