Committee to Establish a National Institute of Finance (CE-NIF), the Center for Financial Policy at the R.H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland and the Pew Financial Reform Project are organizing a workshop on “Frameworks for Systemic Risk Monitoring.” It will be held in Washington DC on June 21-22, 2010.

The conference brings together leading minds from academia, industry, and government (see agenda). Key speakers include Markus Brunnermeier (Princeton), Simon Johnson (MIT), Raghuram Rajan (Chicago), John Geanakoplos (Yale), Rama Cont (Columbia) and Alan King (IBM Research).

Both versions of the regulatory reform legislation that were recently passed in US Congress call for increased efforts to monitor the financial system and respond to signs of heightened systemic risk. Regulators will need new tools to realize this mandate. The aim of the workshop is to move the debate forward on the development of these new tools. The conference will discuss alternative frameworks for understanding systemic risk and strategies for risk monitoring and the implications each of them has for data and systems requirements. A background paper which reviews the debate on systemic risk is also available for download.

Risk Europe 2010 (Frankfurt, 25-28 May) will have a seminar on “Using financial network models for counterparty risk analysis: from micro to macro” by Olli Castren (European Central Bank) and a session on “Using network theory to assess systemic risk” presented by me. Risk Europe is the Risk Magazines annual flagship event and carries this year the theme of “Navigating regulatory reform and reduced liquidity in a changing landscape”.

IMF organizes a conference on “Operationalizing Systemic Risk Monitoring” (Washington DC, 26-28 May). The conference will bring together policy makers, industry and academia to discuss new approaches for identifying systemically important institutions, and for measuring and modeling systemic risk. The conference will have one day devoted to the use of network analysis for assessing systemic risk (see IMF report in previous post). I will participate in a panel session together with Sheri Markose and Rama Cont on “How to Measure Systemic Interconnectedness – Network Perspectives”.

Also on the same week Deutsche Bundesbank is organizing a workshop on “Interconnectedness of Financial Institutions: Microeconomic Evidence, Aggregated Outcomes, and Consequences for Economic Policy” (Frankfurt, 26 May) to discuss the consequences of changes in the financial system and in particular of a greater degree of interconnectedness of financial institutions.

The ECB conference "Recent advances in modelling systemic risk using network analysis" was featured today in Securities Operations Week – a weekly publication focused on US and global securities operations, technology and compliance:

"The financial crisis that began to emerge in 2007 and that gained steam in 2008 famously gave rise to the oft-cited slogan “too big to fail.” It also saw the coinage of a lesser-known catchphrase kicked around commonly now in research circles: “too networked to fail". A summation released last week by the European Central Bank offers what may be the best discussion to date on the subject. [read the full article (pdf)]

MITACS is organizing a Workshop on Financial Networks and Risk Assessment, taking place in Toronto from May 19 to May 21, 2010. The workshop is part of the MITACS International Focus Period on Advances in Network Analysis and its Applications and will be attended by 30-50 specialists in the field (from academia and business) as well as students. The 3 day event will consist of plenary talks, tutorials and contributed talks.

A few conference announcements from INSNA mailing list:

• NetSciCom 2010, Second IEEE International Workshop on Network Science For Communication Networks, March 19, 2010 – San Diego, CA, USA
• 6th UK Social Networks Conference to take place at University of Manchester from 12^th to 16^th of April 2010.
• Workshop on Financial Networks and Risk Assessment, May 19.21, 2010 in Toronto by MITACS
• Third Annual Political Networks Conference, May 19-21, 2010 at Duke University.
• IEEE First International Workshop on Social Networks to take place in Cape Town, South Africa, May 27, 2010. Accepted papers will be published at the IEEE Xplore.
• International Sunbelt Social Networks Conference to take place at Riva del Garda, Trento, Italy, from June 29 to July 4, 2010
• ASONAM 2010 to take place in Odense, Denmark, August 9-11, 2010. The proceedings will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press (pending final approval).
• 7th Conference on Applications of Social Network Analysis (ASNA) will be held in September 15-17, 2010 at ETH Zurich.
• CompleNet 2010, 2nd International Workshop on Complex Networks, Oct 13-15, 2010, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

European Central Bank (ECB) organized a workshop with the above title last Monday, 5th of October. It was the first event of this scale gathering researchers applying network theory and network analysis on banking, financial stability and systemic risk topics. The introductory remarks to the workshop were given by Gertrude Tumpel-Gugerell, Member of the ECB’s Executive Board.

I provided an introduction to network theory and financial network analysis entitled “Is network theory the best hope for regulating systemic risk?” in which I developed topics of an earlier post with the same title: How to measure the systemic importance of a bank, can regulators promote safer financial topologies and is it possible to devise early-warning indicators from real-time transaction data?

Sheri Markose presented a working paper “Too interconnected to fail” where she, Simone Giansante and colleagues do stress tests on US the Credit default swaps (CDS) market. The paper uses a multi-agent simulator developed for this purpose. A demo version of the simulator is available on the above link as well.

Olli Castren (ECB) presented some novel work with Ilja Kavonius (ECB) modeling contagion across sectors of the economy using contingent claims analysis and flow of funds data. The paper “Balance sheet contagion and the transmission of risk in the euro area financial system” was recently published in the ECB Financial Stability Review. The presentation is also available.

NEW: These and other papers and presentations of the workshop are summarized in the ECB publication “Recent advances in modelling systemic risk using network analysis” (7 January 2010). See also the press release.

The Bank of Finland’s simulation seminar was organized for the 7th time on 24-26 August 2009. I thought both the talks and the discussions on the agenda this year were of high quality. I presented some work done together with Marco Galbiati on central counterparties and the topology of clearing networks. The conference covered analysis on new systems or system changes (Nikil Chande, Edward Denbee, Katzeteru Tao, Tomohiro Ota), stress testing (Jennifer Hancock, Horatiu Lovin and Andra Pineta), bank behavior during the crisis (Richard Heuver), money markets (Luca Arciero), methodological issues (Tuomas Nummelin and Matti Hellqvist) and a new approach of using experimental economics to understand the ‘games’ that can take place in payment settlement (Ronald Hejmans). The organization was impeccable once again. I’m looking forward for next year. Its one of the few annual events that attract both policy makers and researchers to discuss financial infrastructure issues.

The first workshop on Agent-Based Modeling in Banking and Finance (ABM-BaF, see agenda) was organized by ISI Foundation, the Association of Italian Bankers, the Italian Cognitive Science Association and the Department of Economics and Public Finance “G. Prato” of the University of Torino. The three day event (9-11 February 2009) brought together researchers, bankers and central bankers and covered a lot of new ground in financial network theory and agent based modeling.

For me the most interesting new research was Domenico Delli Gatti and co-authors work on building bottom up ABM models of the economy (presentation) and Marco Lamieri and co-authors work on building credit risk models incorporating network information extracted from companies’ payment data (presentation).

I (co-)presented two papers. First, a model on “Interdependent payment systems” (presentation) and secondly, some recent work with Marco Galbiati on “Liquidity saving mechanisms and bank behavior” in interbank payment systems (presentation).

I hope the second workshop (possibly in Mexico City next year?) will be as successful as the first one.

Norges Bank organized on 14-15 November its conference on the burgeoning literature of “Payment economics”. Papers covered mainly retail payments topics and interchange fees continued to be on the forefront. The conference agenda with the papers and discussions can be found here.

As for the past five late August weeks, the Bank of Finland organised its annual Payment and Settlement Simulation Seminar. The BoF-PSS2 simulator which I helped to create is now in use in 72 sites across the world, mainly at central banks, clearing houses and universities. The seminar program consisted of a wide array of new research on payment systems and money markets. I was involved in two presentations, both related to ongoing work at the Bank of England. The first one studied the topology of the overnight money market and the second one liquidity saving mechanisms and bank behavior (presentation).