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arXiv 提交日期: 2026-04-15
📄 Abstract - Sandpile Economics: Theory, Identification, and Evidence

Why do capitalist economies recurrently generate crises whose severity is disproportionate to the size of the triggering shock? This paper proposes a structural answer grounded in the evolutionary geometry of production networks. As economies evolve through specialization, integration, and competitive selection, their inter-sectoral linkages drift toward configurations of increasing geometric fragility, eventually crossing a threshold beyond which small disturbances generate disproportionately large cascades. We introduce Sandpile Economics, a formal framework that interprets macroeconomic instability as an emergent property of disequilibrium production networks. The key state variable is the Forman--Ricci curvature of the input--output graph, capturing local substitution possibilities when supply chains are disrupted. We show that when curvature falls below an endogenous threshold, the distribution of cascade sizes follows a power law with tail index $\alpha \in (1,2)$, implying a regime of unbounded amplification. The underlying mechanism is evolutionary: specialization reduces input substitutability, pushing the economy toward criticality, while crisis episodes induce endogenous network reconfiguration and path dependence. These dynamics are inherently non-ergodic and cannot be captured by representative-agent frameworks. Empirically, using global input--output data, we document that production networks operate in persistently negative curvature regimes and that curvature robustly predicts medium-run output dynamics. A one-standard-deviation increase in curvature is associated with higher cumulative growth over three-year horizons, and curvature systematically outperforms standard network metrics in explaining cross-country differences in resilience.

顶级标签: theory systems financial
详细标签: production networks economic crises network curvature cascade dynamics input-output analysis 或 搜索:

沙堆经济学:理论、识别与证据 / Sandpile Economics: Theory, Identification, and Evidence


1️⃣ 一句话总结

这篇论文提出,资本主义经济之所以反复出现与微小冲击不成比例的严重危机,是因为随着生产网络的专业化和整合,其结构会逐渐变得脆弱,最终达到一个临界点,使得小扰动能引发巨大的连锁反应。

源自 arXiv: 2604.13890