Recent economic literature indicates that imperfections in the credit market can amplify business fluctuations causing financial fragility. Starting from the framework of Greenwald and Stiglitz (1993) and Delli Gatti et al. (2005), we make a more careful model of the banking sector in Italy and...

In this paper we analyze the size distribution of Italian firms by age. In other words, we want to establish whether the way that the size of firms is distributed varies as firms become old. As a proxy of size we use capital. In [L.M.B. Cabral, J. Mata, On the evolution of the firm size...

The aim of this paper is to empirically validate the agent-based macroeconomic model of Gaffeo et al. [2008]. We show that the microsimulated version of the model is able to replicate actual data with a satisfactory degree of precision. From a theoretical point of view, our validation approach...

In this paper we analyze the upper tail of the size distribution of Italian companies with limited liability belonging to the CEBI database. Size is defined in terms of net worth.

We discuss a special Pólya lattice model to study cascading failures of firms in a simple industrial economy. In particular, every firm is represented by a Pólya-like urn, whose reinforcement is function of time, of the neighboring urns and their compositions, and of a random variable...

We introduce a new intuitive approach to generalized extreme shock models (GESM) using urn processes. This allows us to indirectly model the moving risky threshold of generalized extreme shock models introduced in [Gut, A., Hsler, J., 2005. Realistic variation of shock models. Statistics &...

We examine the Boulogne wholesale fish market, analysing the structure of the trading network between sellers and buyers. Differently from other works in the literature, our analysis indicates a significant amount of ‘bilateral loyalty’ seller--buyer. Loyalty is from buyers to a few sellers...

Extreme shock models have been introduced in Gut and Hüsler (1999) to study systems that at random times are subject to a shock of random magnitude. These systems break down when the shock overcomes a given resistance level. In this paper we propose an alternative approach to extreme shock...