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The dynamics of public attention to COVID-19 epidemic is studied. The level of public attention is described by the daily number of search requests in Google made by users from a given country. In the empirical part of the work, data on the number of requests and the number of infected cases for a number of countries are considered. It is shown that in all cases the maximum of public attention occurs earlier than the maximum daily number of newly infected individuals. Thus, for a certain period of time, the growth of the epidemics occurs in parallel with the decline in public attention to it. It is also shown that the decline in the number of requests is described by an exponential function of time. In order to describe the revealed empirical pattern, a mathematical model is proposed, which is a modification of the model of the decline in attention after a one-time political event. The model develops the approach that considers decision-making by an individual as a member of the society in which the information process takes place. This approach assumes that an individual’s decision about whether or not to make a request on a given day about COVID is based on two factors. One of them is an attitude that reflects the individual’s long-term interest in a given topic and accumulates the individual’s previous experience, cultural preferences, social and economic status. The second is the dynamic factor of public attention to the epidemic, which changes during the process under consideration under the influence of informational stimuli. With regard to the subject under consideration, information stimuli are related to epidemic dynamics. The behavioral hypothesis is that if on some day the sum of the attitude and the dynamic factor exceeds a certain threshold value, then on that day the individual in question makes a search request on the topic of COVID. The general logic is that the higher the rate of infection growth, the higher the information stimulus, the slower decreases public attention to the pandemic. Thus, the constructed model made it possible to correlate the rate of exponential decrease in the number of requests with the rate of growth in the number of cases. The regularity found with the help of the model was tested on empirical data. It was found that the Student’s statistic is 4.56, which allows us to reject the hypothesis of the absence of a correlation with a significance level of 0.01.

The article deals with the modeling of the number of employed population by branches of the economy at the national and regional levels. The lack of targeted distribution of workers in a market economy requires the study of systemic processes in the labor market that lead to different dynamics of the number of employed in the sectors of the economy. In this case, personal strategies for choosing labor activity by economic agents become important. The presence of different strategies leads to the emergence of strata in the labor market with a dynamically changing number of employees, unevenly distributed among the sectors of the economy. As a result, non-linear fluctuations in the number of employed population can be observed, the toolkit of agentbased modeling is relevant for the study of the fluctuations. In the article, we examined in-phase and anti-phase fluctuations in the number of employees by economic activity on the example of the Jewish Autonomous Region in Russia. The fluctuations found in the time series of statistical data for 2008–2016. We show that such fluctuations appear by age groups of workers. In view of this, we put forward a hypothesis that the agent in the labor market chooses a place of work by a strategy, related with his age group. It directly affects the distribution of the number of employed for different cohorts and the total number of employed in the sectors of the economy. The agent determines the strategy taking into account the socio-economic characteristics of the branches of the economy (different levels of wages, working conditions, prestige of the profession). We construct a basic agentoriented model of a three-branch economy to test the hypothesis. The model takes into account various strategies of economic agents, including the choice of the highest wages, the highest prestige of the profession and the best working conditions by the agent. As a result of numerical experiments, we show that the availability of various industry selection strategies and the age preferences of employers within the industry lead to periodic and complex dynamics of the number of different-aged employees. Age preferences may be a consequence, for example, the requirements of employer for the existence of work experience and education. Also, significant changes in the age structure of the employed population may result from migration.

The distribution of the first significant digit in numerals of connected texts is considered. Benford's law is found to hold approximately for them. Deviations from Benford's law are statistically significant author peculiarities that allow, under certain conditions, to distinguish between parts of the text with a different authorship.