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.

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 Handbook on Systemic Risk, written by experts in the field, provides researchers with an introduction to the multifaceted aspects of systemic risks facing the global financial markets. The Handbook explores the multidisciplinary approaches to analyzing this risk, the data requirements for further research, and the recommendations being made to avert financial crisis. The Handbook is designed to encourage new researchers to investigate a topic with immense societal implications as well as to provide, for those already actively involved within their own academic discipline, an introduction to the research being undertaken in other disciplines. Each chapter in the Handbook will provide researchers with a superior introduction to the field and with references to more advanced research articles. It is the hope of the editors that this Handbook will stimulate greater interdisciplinary academic research on the critically important topic of systemic risk in the global financial markets.

The recent financial crisis and the difficulty of using mainstream macroeconomic models to accurately monitor and assess systemic risk have stimulated new analyses of how we measure economic activity and the development of more sophisticated models in which the financial sector plays a greater role. Markus Brunnermeier and Arvind Krishnamurthy have assembled contributions from leading academic researchers, central bankers, and other financial-market experts to explore the possibilities for advancing macroeconomic modeling in order to achieve more accurate economic measurement. Essays in this volume focus on the development of models capable of highlighting the vulnerabilities that leave the economy susceptible to adverse feedback loops and liquidity spirals. While these types of vulnerabilities have often been identified, they have not been consistently measured. In a financial world of increasing complexity and uncertainty, this volume is an invaluable resource for policymakers working to improve current measurement systems and for academics concerned with conceptualizing effective measurement.

This paper presents a novel approach to investigate and model the network of euro area banks’ large exposures within the global banking system. Drawing on a unique dataset, the paper documents the degree of interconnectedness and systemic risk of the euro area banking system based on bilateral linkages. We develop a Contagion Mapping model fully calibrated with bank-level data to study the contagion potential of an exogenous shock via credit and funding risks. We find that tipping points shifting the euro area banking system from a less vulnerable state to a highly vulnerable state are a non-linear function of the combination of network structures and bank-specific characteristics.

The International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2004) held in Krak ́ ow, Poland, June 6–9, 2004, was a follow-up to the highly successful ICCS 2003 held at two locations, in Melbourne, Australia and St. Petersburg, Russia; ICCS 2002 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and ICCS 2001 in San Francisco, USA. As computational science is still evolving in its quest for subjects of inves- gation and e?cient methods, ICCS 2004 was devised as a forum for scientists from mathematics and computer science, as the basic computing disciplines and application areas, interested in advanced computational methods for physics, chemistry, life sciences, engineering, arts and humanities, as well as computer system vendors and software developers. The main objective of this conference was to discuss problems and solutions in all areas, to identify new issues, to shape future directions of research, and to help users apply various advanced computational techniques. The event harvested recent developments in com- tationalgridsandnextgenerationcomputingsystems,tools,advancednumerical methods, data-driven systems, and novel application ?elds, such as complex - stems, ?nance, econo-physics and population evolution.

The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Networks represents the frontier of research into how and why networks they form, how they influence behavior, how they help govern outcomes in an interactive world, and how they shape collective decision making, opinion formation, and diffusion dynamics. From a methodological perspective, the contributors to this volume devote attention to theory, field experiments, laboratory experiments, and econometrics. Theoretical work in network formation, games played on networks, repeated games, and the interaction between linking and behavior is synthesized. A number of chapters are devoted to studying social process mediated by networks. Topics here include opinion formation, diffusion of information and disease, and learning. There are also chapters devoted to financial contagion and systemic risk, motivated in part by the recent financial crises. Another section discusses communities, with applications including social trust, favor exchange, and social collateral; the importance of communities for migration patterns; and the role that networks and communities play in the labor market. A prominent role of networks, from an economic perspective, is that they mediate trade. Several chapters cover bilateral trade in networks, strategic intermediation, and the role of networks in international trade. Contributions discuss as well the role of networks for organizations. On the one hand, one chapter discusses the role of networks for the performance of organizations, while two other chapters discuss managing networks of consumers and pricing in the presence of network-based spillovers. Finally, the authors discuss the internet as a network with attention to the issue of net neutrality.