The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold. In our view, this lack of understanding is due to a misallocation of research efforts in...

We develop a dynamic computational network model of the banking system where fire sales provide the amplification mechanism of financial shocks. Each period a finite number of banks offers a large, but finite, number of loans to households. Banks with excess liquidity also offer loans to other...