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...

It is shown that any informationally decentralized mechanism that realizes fair allocations over the class of classical pure exchange environments has a message space of dimension no smaller than the number of agents times the number of commodities. Since the equal income Walrasian mechanism, in...

In this paper we review recent advances in financial economics in relation to the measurement of systemic risk. We start by reviewing studies that apply traditional measures of risk to financial institutions. However, the main focus of the review is on studies that use network analysis paying...

Structural changes in an economy or in financial markets can arise as a result of agents adopting rules that appear to be the norm around them. Such rules are adopted by implicit consensus as they turn out to be profitable for individuals. However, as rules develop and spread they may have...

[eng] Organisational structure and networks of interpersonal relations are a central preoccupation for most social scientists. However these aspects of economic activity have received relatively little attention from economists. The idea of this paper is to explain why this is so. The basic...