This paper develops a network model of a stylized banking system in which banks are connected to one another through interbank claims, which allows us to study the diffusion of default avalanches triggered by an exogenous shock under a number of different assumptions on the degree of...

The likelihood of success of grantmaking on large scale projects depends in general on pieces of information widely dispersed and privately held by recipients, public agencies, nongovernmental organizations and other interested parties. In this paper we discuss how philanthropists could...

The bilateral netting of mutual obligations is an institutional arrange- ment usually employed in payment systems to reduce settlement risks. In this paper we explore its advantages and pitfalls when applied to an inter- bank lending market, in which banks extend credit to nÃÉand borrow from...

This paper o¬¨√üers additional evidence on the structure of the international financial network as emerging from the Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey (CPIS) dataset collected by the IMF. Making use of blockmodeling techniques which allow us to ‚àöñt a given...

Macroeconomic models are typically solved through the imposition of a top-down general equilibrium solution constraining agents' rational be- havior. This is customarily obtained by recurring, explicitly or not, to the Walrasian auctioneer (WA) artifice. In this paper we aim at contributing to...

The recent revision (March 2005) of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) has confirmed the 3% deficit/GDP ratio as the pillar of the excessive deficits procedure envisaged by the Maastricht Treaty for member countries of the EMU. Since the deficit/GDP ceiling is still in place, research on its...

This paper employs panel techniques to empirically examine the link between the competitiveness of the banking sector and real economic growth, using data from a sample of OECD economies during 1997-2010. We employ a dynamic GMM model to find that an increase in the efficiency of banks driven by...

In this paper we present the basics of a research program aimed at providing microfoundations to macroeconomic theory on the basis of computational agentbased adaptive descriptions of individual behavior. To exemplify our proposal, a simple prototype model of decentralized multi-market...

The firmly established evidence of right-skewness of the firms’ size distribution is generally modelled recurring to some variant of the Gibrat’s Law of Proportional Effects. In spite of its empirical success, this approach has been harshly criticized on a theoretical ground due to its lack...