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...

In this paper we identify some of the main factors behind systemic risk in a set of international large-scale complex banks using the novel CoVaR approach. We find that short-term wholesale funding is a key determinant in triggering systemic risk episodes. In contrast, we find no evidence that a...

This paper examines several key global market conditions, such as a proxy for market uncertainty and measures of interbank funding stress, to assess financial volatility and the likelihood of crisis. Using Markov regime-switching techniques, it shows that the Lehman Brothers failure was a...