This paper studies the effects of ECB communications about unconventional monetary policy operations on the perceived sovereign risk of Italy over the last five years. More than fifty events concerning non-standard operations are identified and classified with respect to the specific ECB...

In this paper we analyze transitions in the stock markets of the US, the UK, and Germany. For all this markets we find that while the markets were focused on stocks from the IT and technology sector around the year 2000, this focus has vanished and the markets have mostly moved towards a focus...

This study analyzes the emergence of secular stagnation as the consequence of a rise in the preference for liquidity. Such a rise is caused by a persistent set of pessimistic expectations. This study also investigates the effectiveness of a broad range of demand-management policies in dealing...

We analyze the stock prices of the S&P market from 1987 to 2012 with the covariance matrix of the firm returns determined in time windows of several years. The eigenvector belonging to the leading eigenvalue (market) exhibits in its long term time dependence a phase transition with an order...

Alan Greenspan's paper (March 2010) presents his retrospective view of the crisis. His theme has several parts. First, the housing price bubble, its subsequent collapse and the financial crisis were not predicted either by the market, the FED, the IMF or the regulators in the years leading to...

We explore the network topology arising from a dataset of the overnight interbank transactions on the e-MID trading platform from January 1999 to December 2010. In order to shed light on the hierarchical structure of the banking system, we estimate different versions of a core-periphery model....

This paper investigates the driving forces behind banks’ link formation in the interbank market by applying the stochastic actor oriented model (SAOM) developed in sociology. Our data consists of quarterly networks constructed from the transactions on an electronic platform (e-MID) over the...

Previous literature on statistical properties of interbank loans has reported various power-laws, particularly for the degree distribution (i.e. the distribution of credit links between institutions). In this paper, we revisit data for the Italian interbank network based on overnight loans...

This paper uses a toy financial system to study systemic risk in scale-free interbank networks. Networks are produced according to a fitness algorithm, combined with a representation of the balance sheets of the banks. Our generating processes for interbank networks are designed in a way to...

This paper puts forward a novel approach to the analysis of direct contagion in financial networks. Financial systems are here represented as flow networks -i.e., directed and weighted graphs endowed with source nodes and sink nodes – and the propagation of losses and defaults, originated by...