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Working Paper
Recreating Banking Networks under Decreasing Fixed Costs
Theory emphasizes the central role of the structure of networks in the behavior of financial systems and their response to policy. Real-world networks, however, are rarely directly observable: Banks? assets and liabilities are typically known, but not who is lending how much and to whom. We first show how to simulate realistic networks that are based on balance-sheet information by minimizing costs where there is a fixed cost to forming a link. Second, we also show how to do this for a model with fixed costs that are decreasing in the number of links. To approach the optimization problem, we ...
Working Paper
Un-Networking: The Evolution of Networks in the Federal Funds Market
Using a network approach to characterize the evolution of the federal funds market during the Great Recession and financial crisis of 2007-2008, we document that many small federal funds lenders began reducing their lending to larger institutions in the core of the network starting in mid-2007. But an abrupt change occurred in the fall of 2008, when small lenders left the federal funds market en masse and those that remained lent smaller amounts, less frequently. We then test whether changes in lending patterns within key components of the network were associated with increases in ...