In November, 2011, the Financial Stability Board, in collaboration with the International Monetary Fund, published a list of 29 “systemically important financial institutions” (SIFIs, now referred to as “globally systemically important banks” or G-SIBs), institutions whose failure, by...

Productivity levels and growth are extremely heterogeneous among firms. A vast literature has developed to explain the origins of productivity shocks, their dispersion, evolution and their relationship to the business cycle. We examine in detail the distribution of labor productivity levels and...

Currently financial stress test simulations that take into account multiple interacting contagion mechanisms are conditional on a specific, subjectively imposed stress-scenario. Eigenvalue-based approaches, in contrast, provide a scenario-independent measure of systemic stability, but only...

Analysis of properties of the global trade network has generated new insights into the patterns of economic development across countries. The Economic Complexity Index (ECI), in particular, has been successful at explaining cross-country differences in GDP/capita and economic growth. The ECI...

We consider how to optimally allocate investments in a portfolio of competing technologies using the standard mean-variance framework of portfolio theory. We assume that technologies follow the empirically observed relationship known as Wright's law, also called a "learning curve" or "experience...

The use of equilibrium models in economics springs from the desire for parsimonious models of economic phenomena that take human reasoning into account. This approach has been the cornerstone of modern economic theory. We explain why this is so, extolling the virtues of equilibrium theory; then...

The limit order book is a device for storing demand and effecting trades that is the primary mechanism for price formation in most modern financial markets. We study the limit order book under a random process model of order flow, using simulations and an analytic treatment based on a master...

We introduce an algorithm for the segmentation of a class of regime switching processes. The segmentation algorithm is a non parametric statistical method able to identify the regimes (patches) of the time series. The process is composed of consecutive patches of variable length, each patch...

We introduce an evolutionary game with feedback between perception and reality, which we call the reality game. It is a game of chance in which the probabilities for different objective outcomes (e.g. heads or tails in a coin toss) depend on the amount wagered on those outcomes. By varying the...