Kenya is about to embark on an important reform to expand banking to millions of poor households by enabling third-party retail agents as a low-cost distribution alternative to branches. However, this initiative risks being undermined by the mobile network operator (MNO) Safaricom, which...

We develop an operational model of information contagion and show how it may be integrated into a mainstream, top-down, stress-testing framework to quantify systemic risk. The key transmission mechanism is a two-way interaction between the beliefs of secondary market investors and the...