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...

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions not only lowers expected damages from climate change but also reduces the risk of catastrophic impacts. However, estimates of the social cost of carbon, which measures the marginal value of carbon dioxide abatement, often do not capture this risk reduction...

In the aftermath of the Great Recession and during the debt crisis in the euro area yields on German federal bonds have been exceptionally low. This analysis tries to calculate the profits that the federal government makes due to the low yields. The interest payments that are due to emissions of...

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...

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...

Maximum likelihood estimation of discretely observed diffusion processes is mostly hampered by the lack of a closed form solution of the transient density. It has recently been argued that a most generic remedy to this problem is the numerical solution of the pertinent Fokker-Planck (FP) or...

A popular interpretation of the Rational Expectations/Efficient Markets hypothesis states that, if the hypothesis holds, then market valuations must follow a random walk. This postulate has frequently been criticized on the basis of empirical evidence. Yet the assertion itself incurs what we...

This paper examines empirically whether oil price shocks impact stock market returns. Using monthly data for eight developed countries from January 1991 to September 2013, strong negative connections between oil price and stock market returns are found in seven of the selected countries. Oil...

In this paper, we elaborate on an idea initially developed by Weitzman (1998) that justifies taking the lowest possible discount rate for far-distant future cash flows. His argument relies on the arbitrary assumption that when the future rate of return of capital (RRC) is uncertain, one should...