This book opens new ground in the study of financial crises. It treats the financial system as a complex adaptive system and shows how lessons from network disciplines - such as ecology, epidemiology, and statistical mechanics - shed light on our understanding of financial stability. Using tools...

The recent financial crisis has brought the issue of banking system ‘stress tests’ to the fore. This paper describes recent progress in the area of systemic risk modelling and measurement and discusses how the results of such analyses are helping shape the practical framework for...

We examine the safety of government bonds in the presence of Knightian uncertainty amongst financial market participants. In our model, the information insensitivity of government bonds is driven by strategic complementarities across counterparties and the structure of trading relationships. We...

Recent debate on the reform of the international financial architecture has highlighted the potentially important role of the official sector in crisis management. We examine how such public intervention in sovereign debt crises affects efficiency, ex ante and ex post. Our results shed light on...

We examine the financial stability implications of covered bonds. Banks issue covered bonds by encumbering assets on their balance sheet and placing them within a dynamic ring fence. As more assets are encumbered, jittery unsecured creditors may run, leading to a banking crisis. We provide...

This paper develops a network model of interbank lending in which unsecured claims, repo activity and shocks to the haircuts applied to collateral assume centre stage. We show how systemic liquidity crises of the kind associated with the interbank market collapse of 2007–2008 can arise within...

This note presents a simple model that nests the “excess liquidity” and “savings glut” hypotheses of the debate on the recent asset price boom. It clarifies the notion of investors’ ‘search for yield’ and shows how financial frictions influence asset price dynamics.