We address the paradox that financial innovations aimed at risk-sharing appear to have made the world riskier. Financial innovations facilitate hedging idiosyncratic risks among agents; however, aggregate risks can be hedged only with liquid assets. When risk-sharing is primitive, agents...

We propose a theory-driven framework for monitoring system-wide risk. Our approach extends the one-firm Merton (1974) credit risk model to a generalized stochastic network-based framework across all financial institutions, comprising a novel approach to measuring systemic risk over time. We...