Abstract:

The global credit crisis that started in 2007 has shown how contagion risk can propagate in the financial system. It has triggered a huge interest in the use of network concepts to better understand how contagion risk can propagate through the banking system. In the recent years, the field of financial networks models and its applications to contagion risk have attracted growing interest both among scholars and practitioners. The literature on network models of contagion risk is today quite vast, covering both theoretical and empirical aspects. This review concentrates on different classes of contagion risk discussed by various scholars such as default contagion, common assets contagion, distress contagion, funding liquidity contagion and network-based stress testing. Our observation show that default contagion is the most important line of research for researchers and scholars, however this domain of contagion risk remains a fertile area for academic research into the next decades.