Financial stability from a network perspective

This thesis consists of six chapters related to applications of network analysis’ methods for financial stability. The first chapter introduces the network perspective as a new mapping technique for studying and understanding financial markets’architecture. The second chapter breaks down the Colombian sovereign securities market into different layers of interaction corresponding to distinct trading and registering platforms. The third chapter addresses an overlooked issue: How to measure the importance of financial market infrastructures within their corresponding network. The fourth chapter studies the connective and hierarchical structure of the Colombian non-collateralized money market, and uses an information retrieval algorithm for identifying those financial institutions that simultaneously excel at borrowing and lending central bank’s liquidity (i.e. superspreaders). The fifth chapter addresses –for the first time- the question regarding the presence of a modular hierarchy in financial networks, and discusses the main implications for financial stability. The sixth chapter explicitly models the role of financial market infrastructures as financial markets’ “plumbing”, and recognizes that traditional analysis of financial institutions networks is of a virtual or logical nature. The third chapter is published in the Journal of Financial Market Infrastructures (Vol.2 (3), 2014), whereas the fourth chapter is published in the Journal of Financial Stability (Vol.15, 2014).