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GMU C4I Center Seminar

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The Network Externalities in Hawala Money Transfers

Dr. Anamaria Berea

Friday, February 8, 2013 at 1:30 PM

Engineering building, Room 4705

ABSTRACT

This project is both a methodological investigation and a data analysis of a financial mechanism that remains elusive to data mining and quantitative based sciences. It is an investigation of the informal value transfer networks - hawala - through the methods of social network analysis. Although hawala has been tied to financing terrorism activities worldwide, only a small part of the hawala exchanges are "illegitimate" in the sense understood by Western economies. Based on a data set constructed from the "bottom-up", from mass-media reports and online open sources, this analysis shows a few significant network externalities in the hawaladars networks from Pakistan and Afghanistan. Although data spans a couple of decades, the results are descriptive and show the ties of the hawaladars from Peshawar to both legitimate and illegitimate businesses in India, Dubai, Thailand and UK.

BIO

Dr. Berea has a PhD in Computational Social Science from George Mason University and a PhD in International Business and Economics from the Academy of Economic Studies in Romania. Anamaria joined the DAGGRE research project in 2011 as a graduate research assistant and an advanced doctoral student. Within this project, she has been working on specific topics using social network analysis, Bayesian network modeling, GIS and prediction markets in order to forecast world events. She is working on managing the forecasting problems on the prediction market, on decomposing and modeling specific forecasting problems, such as the Eurozone breakup, Greek Exit or the Failed States Index and on analyzing the role of autotrading algorithms for forecasting accuracy and the overall market activity.

The research and paper she had developed for modeling hawala networks won an Assyst Bursary Award from ESSA (European Social Simulation Association), as well as an official recommendation letter from the Head of Counter-Terrorism in Calcutta, India.