External or internal shocks may lead to the collapse of a system consisting of many agents. If the shock hits only one agent initially and causes it to fail, this can induce a cascade of failures among neighoring agents. Several critical constellations determine whether this cascade remains...

The authors build a simple agent-based model populated by households with heterogenous and time-varying financial conditions in order to study how fiscal multipliers can change over the business cycle and are affected by the state of credit markets. They find that deficit-spending fiscal policy...

In this paper, we investigate the causal effects of public and private debts on U.S. output dynamics. We estimate a battery of Cointegrated Structural Vector Autoregressive models, and we identify structural shocks by employing Independent Component Analysis, a data-driven technique which avoids...

We build an agent-based model populated by households with heterogenous and time-varying financial conditions in order to study how fiscal multipliers can change over the business cycle and are affected by the state of credit markets. We find that deficit-spending fiscal policy dampens the...

In this work we study the granular origins of business cycles and their possible underlying drivers. As shown by Gabaix (2011), the skewed nature of firm size distributions implies that idiosyncratic (and independent) firm-level shocks may account for a significant portion of aggregate...

In this work, we evaluate the exposure of Italian regions to the risk associated with the spread of COVID-19 through a two-step value chain approach. First, we estimate the degree of participation of Italian regions in a plurality of value chains linked to consumption, investment and exports. We...