“Elimination of systemic risk in financial markets”

The talk by Stefan Thurner is part of the Abstracts Research Seminar for the Summer Term 2019 , organized by Vienna University of Business and Economics.

The talk takes place on Mar, 01, 2019.

Abstract

Systemic risk in financial markets arises—to a large extent—through the interconnectedness of agents through financial contracts. We show that the systemic risk level of every player in a financial system can be quantified by simple network measures. With actual central bank data of Austria and Mexico we are able to compute the total expected systemic losses of an economy, a number that allows us to estimate the cost of a financial crisis. We can further show on real data that it is possible to compute the systemic risk contribution of every single transaction in the financial system. We propose a smart financial transaction tax that incentivizes players to avoid systemically risky transactions. Avoiding this tax effectively restructures the topology of financial networks so that large-scale contagion events become impossible. We can prove the existence of a systemically risk-optimal equilibrium under this tax. An agent based model demonstrates that this Systemic Risk Tax practically eliminates the network-component of systemic risk in a system.