Principal Investigator: Mohamed Al Guindy, Finance Funder: SSHRC Insight Development
The goal of this project is to construct a novel network of all firms in the economy based on social media discussions. The project will utilize a unique dataset of over 50 million financial tweets, originating from millions of Twitter users to first identify peer firms for each firm in the economy, and subsequently aggregate these connections to construct a network of the whole economy. This network representation of the economy can be viewed as a map of all firms and all the interconnections between them – including the strength of connections. This network view will also identify the formation of clusters – or economically linked firms – on the network. Because this network is based on current social media discussions, clusters of connected firms will form and evolve over time – and this will be captured in this network: making it both dynamic and timely. We refer to this network of the economy based on social media discussions as the “social internetwork”.