Systemic risk is a fundamental constituent of contemporary financial systems. For the past decades a growing number of abrupt upsets in financial systems could be observed. Due to previous experiences, politicians and regulators prefer to identify the off enders outside the system or to blame...

Stephen Bell and Andrew Hindmoor compare banking systems in the U.S. and UK to those of Canada and Australia and explain why the system imploded in the former but not the latter. Canadian and Australian banks were able to make profits through traditional lending practices, unlike their...

This paper puts forward a novel approach to the analysis of direct contagion in financial networks. Financial systems are here represented as flow networks -i.e., directed and weighted graphs endowed with source nodes and sink nodes – and the propagation of losses and defaults, originated by...