July 27, 2018
In this article the problem of reconstructing the pattern of connection between agents from partial empirical data in a macro-economic model is addressed, given a set of behavioral equations. This systemic point of view puts the focus on distributional and network effects, rather than time-dependence. Using the theory of complex networks we compare several models to reconstruct both the topology and the flows of money of the different types of monetary transactions, while imposing a series of constraints related to national accounts, and to empirical network sparsity. Some properties of reconstructed networks are compared with their empirical counterpart.
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When studying social, economic and biological systems, one has often access to only limited information about the structure of the underlying networks. An example of paramount importance is provided by financial systems: information on the interconnections between financial institutions is privacy-protected, dramatically reducing the possibility of correctly estimating crucial systemic properties such as the resilience to the propagation of shocks. The need to compensate for ...
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In the study of economic networks, econometric approaches interpret the traditional Gravity Model specification as the expected link weight coming from a probability distribution whose functional form can be chosen arbitrarily, while statistical-physics approaches construct maximum-entropy distributions of weighted graphs, constrained to satisfy a given set of measurable network properties. In a recent, companion paper, we integrated the two approaches and applied them to the...
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In recent years, methods from network science are gaining rapidly interest in economics and finance. A reason for this is that in a globalized world the interconnectedness among economic and financial entities are crucial to understand and networks provide a natural framework for representing and studying such systems. In this paper, we are surveying the use of networks and network-based methods for studying economy related questions. We start with a brief overview of graph t...
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Economic and financial networks play a crucial role in various important processes, including economic integration, globalization, and financial crises. Of particular interest is understanding whether the temporal evolution of a real economic network is in a (quasi-)stationary equilibrium, i.e. characterized by smooth structural changes rather than abrupt transitions. Smooth changes in quasi-equilibrium networks can be generally controlled for, and largely predicted, via an a...
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In this paper we estimate the propagation of liquidity shocks through interbank markets when the information about the underlying credit network is incomplete. We show that techniques such as Maximum Entropy currently used to reconstruct credit networks severely underestimate the risk of contagion by assuming a trivial (fully connected) topology, a type of network structure which can be very different from the one empirically observed. We propose an efficient message-passing ...
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The combination of the network theoretic approach with recently available abundant economic data leads to the development of novel analytic and computational tools for modelling and forecasting key economic indicators. The main idea is to introduce a topological component into the analysis, taking into account consistently all higher-order interactions. We present three basic methodologies to demonstrate different approaches to harness the resulting network gain. First, a mul...
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Recent events such as the global financial crisis have renewed the interest in the topic of economic networks. One of the main channels of shock propagation among countries is the International Trade Network (ITN). Two important models for the ITN structure, the classical gravity model of trade (more popular among economists) and the fitness model (more popular among networks scientists), are both limited to the characterization of only one representation of the ITN. The grav...
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Recent crises have shown that the knowledge of the structure of input-output networks at the firm level is crucial when studying economic resilience from the microscopic point of view of firms that rewire their connections under supply and demand shocks. Unfortunately, empirical inter-firm network data are rarely accessible and protected by confidentiality. The available methods of network reconstruction from partial information, which have been devised for financial exposure...
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Economic integration, globalization and financial crises represent examples of processes whose understanding requires the analysis of the underlying network structure. Of particular interest is establishing whether a real economic network is in a state of (quasi)stationary equilibrium, i.e. characterized by smooth structural changes rather than abrupt transitions. While in the former case the behaviour of the system can be reasonably controlled and predicted, in the latter ca...
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