Recreating Banking Networks under Decreasing Fixed Costs

Ben Craig, Dietmar Maringer and Sandra Paterlini

No 19-21, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Abstract: 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 develop a new algorithm based on the transportation planning literature. Computational experiments find that the resulting networks are not only consistent with the balance sheets, but also resemble real-world financial networks in their density (which is sparse but not minimally dense) and in their core-periphery and disassortative structure.

Keywords: banking networks; network models; optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C44 E59 G21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2019-11-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedcwq:192100

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DOI: 10.26509/frbc-wp-201921

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