Measuring Systemic Risk and Contagion in Financial Networks

Abstract

Liabilities between financial entities form a network. The clearing of liabilities and thereby contagion of risk and default depend on this network structure. We provide an accurate and unrestricted mathematical model to understand clearing and propagated default in financial networks. This yields a precise measure for the systemic risk induced by individual financial entities. Moreover, the model allows to compute optimal bailout strategies that either minimize the cost of the intervention or maximize the stabilizing effect for a given bailout budget. Finally, the computational efficiency of the model allows to analyze very large scale networks quickly.

Keywords: systemic risk, network flows, contagion, clearing