We discuss a special Pólya lattice model to study cascading failures of firms in a simple industrial economy. In particular, every firm is represented by a Pólya-like urn, whose reinforcement is function of time, of the neighboring urns and their compositions, and of a random variable...

The recent financial crisis poses the challenge to understand how systemic risk arises endogenously and what architecture can make the financial system more resilient to global crises. This paper shows that a financial network can be most resilient for intermediate levels of risk...

We explore the dynamics of default cascades in a network of credit interlinkages in which each agent is at the same time a borrower and a lender. When some counterparties of an agent default, the loss she experiences amounts to her total exposure to those counterparties. A possible conjecture in...

From the macroeconomist's viewpoint, agent based modelling has an obvious drawback: it makes impossible to think in aggregate terms. The modeller, in fact, can reconstruct aggregate variables only “from the bottom up” by summing the levels of a myriad of individual variables. We propose a...

We attempt to rank various banking network architectures according to their relative efficiency in distributing liquidity between banks. Using a fictitious economy where individual banks are part of a wider network, we perform a simulationsbased analysis that utilizes two alternative criteria of...

We construct a model of valuation to assess the financial fragility of a set of firms in a closed economy. A firm is identified with a possibly infinite random sequence of benefits. Firms with negative benefits in a given period are said to be in distress and need liquidity to refinance their...