We discuss a special Pólya lattice model to study cascading failures of firms in a simple industrial economy. In particular, every firm is represented by a Pólya-like urn, whose reinforcement is function of time, of the neighboring urns and their compositions, and of a random variable...

Extreme shock models have been introduced in Gut and Hüsler (1999) to study systems that at random times are subject to a shock of random magnitude. These systems break down when the shock overcomes a given resistance level. In this paper we propose an alternative approach to extreme shock...

Using a large industrial panel, we show that the size distribution of Italian manufacturing firms can be well approximated by a two-parameter generalized Pareto distribution (GPD); the fitting is particularly good for medium-large companies. This evidence seems to hold using different proxies of...

In this paper we propose a new nonparametric approach to interacting failing systems (FS), that is systems whose probability of failure is not negligible in a fixed time horizon, a typical example being firms and financial bonds. The main purpose when studying a FS is to calculate the...

Pareto distributions, and power laws in general, have demonstrated to be very useful models to describe very different phenomena, from physics to finance. In recent years, the econophysical literature has proposed a large amount of papers and models justifying the presence of power laws in...

We examine the Boulogne wholesale fish market, analysing the structure of the trading network between sellers and buyers. Differently from other works in the literature, our analysis indicates a significant amount of ‘bilateral loyalty’ seller--buyer. Loyalty is from buyers to a few sellers...

Block bootstrap has been introduced in the literature for resampling dependent data, i.e. stationary processes. One of the main assumptions in block bootstrapping is that the blocks of observations are exchangeable, i.e. their joint distribution is immune to permutations. In this paper we...

In this paper we analyze the size distribution of Italian firms by age. In other words, we want to establish whether the way that the size of firms is distributed varies as firms become old. As a proxy of size we use capital. In [L.M.B. Cabral, J. Mata, On the evolution of the firm size...

The aim of this paper is to empirically validate the agent-based macroeconomic model of Gaffeo et al. [2008]. We show that the microsimulated version of the model is able to replicate actual data with a satisfactory degree of precision. From a theoretical point of view, our validation approach...

Recent economic literature indicates that imperfections in the credit market can amplify business fluctuations causing financial fragility. Starting from the framework of Greenwald and Stiglitz (1993) and Delli Gatti et al. (2005), we make a more careful model of the banking sector in Italy and...