This paper draws on network theory to investigate European banks' sovereign debt exposures. Banks' holdings of sovereign debt build a network of financial linkages with European countries that exhibits a long-tail distribution of node degrees. A highly connected network core of 15 banks is...

This paper examines whether the Big Three credit rating agencies actually played as active a role in the Euro Crisis as previously asserted. On the basis of panel data methods for a set of 11 EMU countries, the analysis reveals significant evidence for an arbitrary markup on the GIPS group of...

We introduce a new measure of systemic risk, the change in the conditional joint probability of default, which assesses the effects of the interdependence in the financial system on the general default risk of sovereign debtors. We apply our measure to examine the fragility of the European...