“Our starting motivation for these projects was to try to understand how legislators make decisions and whether connections are a factor when they vote,” Battaglini explains. “But once you’ve addressed these abstract general questions, they can have implications in other contexts. If you know how to estimate social connections using observables, you can use that to predict social connections in many different situations. For instance, banks interact by lending money to each other and so forth. If we have a banking crisis, these connections may actually help propagate shocks, so knowing about them may help predict how the shock on one bank may affect another bank.”
Provided
Historic instruments from the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards will take center stage during public concerts, lectures, roundtables and more during Forte | Piano 2025: Crafting Soundscapes.