This open access book is a groundbreaking exploration of systemic risk in modern financial systems. Through its theoretical and empirical investigations, it reveals the multidimensionality of systemic risk, the transmission channels of crises, and the interlinkages between physical, transition, and financial risks. It introduces cutting-edge methodologies, including prediction and optimization models based on complex networks, multilayer networks and eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) approaches, to forecast and measure systemic risk and financial crisis. It provides insight for academics, practitioners, policy and supervisory authorities, and bankers and financial market operators on understanding the links that determine the propagation of financial crises and the emergence of systemic risks. This book is essential for those wishing to better understand systemic risk and its implications.

This book applies some of the lessons from network disciplines - such as ecology, epidemiology, and engineering - to study and measure how small probability events can lead to contagion and banking crises on a global scale.

Systemic Risk opens new ground in the study of financial crises. It treats the financial system as a complex adaptive system and shows how lessons from network disciplines - such as ecology, epidemiology, and statistical mechanics - shed light on our understanding of financial stability. Using tools from network theory and economics, it suggests that financial systems are robust-yet-fragile, with knife-edge properties that are greatly exacerbated by the hoarding of funds and the fire sale of assets by banks. This book studies the damaging network consequences of the failure of large inter-connected institutions, explains how key funding markets can seize up across the entire financial system, and shows how the pursuit of secured finance by banks in the wake of the global financial crisis can generate systemic risks. The insights are then used to model banking systems calibrated to data to illustrate how financial sector regulators are beginning to quantify financial system stress.

This volume presents a unified mathematical framework for the transmission channels for damaging shocks that can lead to instability in financial systems. As the title suggests, financial contagion is analogous to the spread of disease, and damaging financial crises may be better understood by bringing to bear ideas from studying other complex systems in our world. After considering how people have viewed financial crises and systemic risk in the past, it delves into the mechanics of the interactions between banking counterparties. It finds a common mathematical structure for types of crises that proceed through cascade mappings that approach a cascade equilibrium. Later chapters follow this theme, starting from the underlying random skeleton graph, developing into the theory of bootstrap percolation, ultimately leading to techniques that can determine the large scale nature of contagious financial cascades.

The recent crisis has highlighted the crucial role that existing linkages among banks and financial institutions plays in channeling and amplifying shocks hitting the system. The structure and evolution of such web of linkages can be fruitfully characterized using concepts borrowed from the theory of (complex) networks. This paper critically surveys recent theoretical work that exploits this concept to explain the sources of contagion and systemic risk in financial markets. We taxonomize existing contributions according to the impact of network connectivity, bank heterogeneity, existing uncertainty in financial markets, portfolio composition of the banks. We end with a discussion of the most important challenges faced by theoretical network-based models of systemic risk. These include a better understanding of the causal links between network structure and the likelihood of systemic risk and increasingly using the empirical knowledge about real-world financial-network structures to calibrate theoretical models.

The stability of the financial system and the potential for systemic events to alter its function have long been critical issues for central bankers and researchers. Recent events suggest that older models of systemic shocks might no longer capture all of the possible paths of such disturbances or account for the increasing complexity of the financial system. To help assess these concerns, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the NRC cosponsored a conference that brought together engineers, scientists, economists, and financial market experts to promote better understanding of systemic risk in a variety of fields. The book presents an examination of tools used in ecology and engineering to study systemic collapse in those areas; a review of current trends in economic research on systemic risk, the payments system, and the market of interbank funds; and for context, descriptions of how systemic risk in the financial system affects trading activities.

Using network models to investigate the interconnectivity in modern economic systems allows researchers to better understand and explain some economic phenomena. This volume presents contributions by known experts and active researchers in economic and financial network modeling. Readers are provided with an understanding of the latest advances in network analysis as applied to economics, finance, corporate governance, and investments. Moreover, recent advances in market network analysis that focus on influential techniques for market graph analysis are also examined. Young researchers will find this volume particularly useful in facilitating their introduction to this new and fascinating field. Professionals in economics, financial management, various technologies, and network analysis, will find the network models presented in this book beneficial in analyzing the interconnectivity in modern economic systems.