Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Public and private organizations are increasingly aware of the potential value of data and analytics to improving organizational performance and outcomes. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is one of those organizations. Its size, complexity, security needs, and culture have created a challenging environment for successful use of data in decisionmaking. DoD's acquisition data lay an important part of the foundation for decisions about weapon systems. Because the private sector faces similar data challenges, the authors examined commercial data practices that might translate to the DoD acquisition community in the areas of data governance and analytics. Benchmarking select private-sector data governance and analytics practices helps establish a baseline against which DoD practices can be compared. That comparison can be used to identify areas in which DoD could improve and suggests actions or approaches to make those improvements. The authors determined that functions associated with the office of a chief data officer and associated data governance and data management are foundational requirements to pursue an analytics strategy in any organization.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

In the years following the 2008 financial crisis, significant attention was paid to systemic risk within heavily interconnected financial networks. The academic discussions on interbank network structure, market stability, and contagion gave rise to a policy debate about whether major banks had become both too big and too interconnected to fail. However, despite the focus on systemic risk—the risk of market collapse resulting from firm-level risks—within the financial sector, little attention was paid to systemic risks in the economy at large. The authors of this report address that gap in research. To begin to measure the potential magnitude of systemic risk in the broad economy, the authors estimated firm-to-firm connections across sectors of the U.S. economy. Using network analysis on observed firm-level networks to elucidate heavily interconnected firms and areas of centrality (i.e., firms of significant network importance), statistical inference, and network calibration, the authors provide a new approach to modeling the economy at the firm level that expands on the traditional sector-level input-output modeling by estimating firm-level input-output flows. The result allows one to use traditional input-output modeling to estimate the size of potential idiosyncratic shocks and to use economically weighted measures of centrality to reveal systemically important firms. The approach is a contribution to the growing literature on the microfoundations of economic risk, with the potential for use across a wide range of applications from financial stability to natural disasters.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Social movement research is becoming increasingly important, as information and communications technologies (ICTs) have altered the ways movements form, organize, mobilize, and act, as well as the ways in which they are surveilled and disrupted. The authors of this report explore the use of agent-based modeling as a method for studying the effects of ICTs on the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of social movements over time. The authors first reviewed selected research on recent technologies and social movements and conducted case studies of the Arab Spring protests in Egypt in 2010, the civil uprising in Syria in 2010, and the Hong Kong protests in 2019. They then developed and tested an agent-based model (ABM) that simulates the role of technology on specific features of social movements. The authors present conclusions from this exploratory research and discuss how to better employ ABMs as a tool for understanding the dynamics of social movements.

Social movements --- Information technology --- Communication in social action. --- Internet and activism. --- Research. --- Political aspects.