Economic Networks

Towards a Faceted Taxonomy of Financial Services

Reading Time: 27 min.
Who Needs a New Financial Services Taxonomy? Our age is increasingly dominated by the dual challenges and opportunities of the sustainability transition on the one hand, and digital transformation on the other. We witness emerging new financial domains with novel names such as Fintech , or TechFin, or various combinations and hues of Green and Sustainable in Sustainable Finance and we see forces that are reshaping the direction of travel for the financial industry.
White Paper 15, Tensor Representations of ActivityPub Networks

White Paper 15, Tensor Representations of ActivityPub Networks

Reading Time: 1 min.
Open Risk White Paper 15: Tensor Representations of ActivityPub Networks In this third Open Risk White Paper on Connecting the Dots we explore representations of online communication networks that are organized according to the ActivityPub protocol. We discuss the main relevant features of the protocol and the broader application ecosystem around it that shapes emerging online network topologies. We develop a stylized description of ActivityPub compliant networks as a mathematical multilayer network.
Connecting the Dots, Tensor Representations of Activitypub Networks

Connecting the Dots, Tensor Representations of Activitypub Networks

Reading Time: 4 min.
What are ActivityPub Networks? ActivityPub is a technical specification towards decentralized (more precisely, federated) social networking (termed the Fediverse) based upon the exchange of ActivityStreams messages that follow the Activity Vocabulary. The ActivityPub proposal has been standardized and published by the W3C and has motivated the design of several federated social networking systems. There are presently several concrete ActivityPub compliant implementations and the protocol sees meaningful adoption, primarily in the domain of federated social networks.
Electrifying the Doughnut: Simplified Visions of Sustainable Finance

Electrifying the Doughnut: Simplified Visions of Sustainable Finance

Reading Time: 30 min.

June 21 2023 marks the sixth annual #ShowYourStripes Day - a time when meteorologists and other climate communicators around the world raise awareness of our warming planet by displaying colorful visuals of climate change. The warming stripe graphics are representations of the change in temperature over the past 100+ years (here we use the global average). Each stripe represents the temperature averaged over a year. The stripes typically start around the year 1900 and finish in 2022.

White Paper 14, Integrated Energy Accounting using Relational Databases

White Paper 14, Integrated Energy Accounting using Relational Databases

Reading Time: 3 min.
Open Risk White Paper 14: Integrated energy accounting using relational databases In this Open Risk White Paper we demonstrate a concrete implementation of an integrated energy accounting framework using relational database technologies. The framework enables accounting of non-financial disclosures (such as the physical and embodied energy footprints of economic transactions) while enforcing the familiar double-entry balance constraints used to produce conventional (monetary) accounts and financial statements. In addition, it allows enforcing constraints associated with the flow and transformations of energy that can happen inside the organizational perimeter.
White Paper 13, Techniques for Federated Analysis

White Paper 13, Techniques for Federated Analysis

Reading Time: 1 min.
Open Risk White Paper 13: Federated Credit Systems, Part II: Techniques for Federated Data Analysis In this Open Risk White Paper, the second of series focusing on Federated Credit Systems, we explore techniques for federated credit data analysis. Building on the first paper where we outlined the overall architecture, essential actors and information flows underlying various business models of credit provision, in this step we focus on the enabling arrangements and techniques for building Federated Credit Data Systems and enabling Federated Analysis.
Mathematical Representations of Credit Portfolio Data

Mathematical Representations of Credit Portfolio Data

What do we mean by credit data? This post is a discussion around mathematical terminology and concepts that are useful in the context of working with credit data, taking us from network graph representations of credit systems to commonly used reference data sets

Reading Time: 27 min.
Definition of Credit Data What do we mean by credit data? For our purposes Credit Data is any well-defined dataset that has direct applications in the assessment of the Credit Risk of an individual or an organization, or, more generally, a dataset that allows the application of data driven Credit Portfolio Management policies. The appearance of credit data is quite familiar to practitioners: A spreadsheet, or a table in a database, with a number of columns and rows full of all sorts of information about borrowers and loans.
First public release of the Solstice simulation framework

First public release of the Solstice simulation framework

Solstice is a flexible open source economic network simulator. Its primary outcomes are quantitative analyses of the behavior of economic systems under uncertainty. In this post we provide a first overall description of Solstice to accompany the first public release.

Reading Time: 5 min.
Modeling economic networks and their dynamics Economic networks are the primary abstractions though which we can conceptualize the state (condition) and evolution of economic interactions. This simply reflects the fact that human economies are quite fundamentally systems of interacting actors (or nodes in a network) with transient or more permanent relations between them. In practice the network character of an economy is frequently suppressed or under-emphasized and does not play a particularly important role.
Open Risk White Paper: Deep Linking Financial and Energy Accounting

Open Risk White Paper: Deep Linking Financial and Energy Accounting

We develop a conceptual framework for integrated accounting that imposes on certain non-financial disclosures the same double-entry balance constraints that apply to conventional financial statements. We identify the key ingredients required for a rigorous multidimensional accounting framework in terms of concepts, postulates and design choices, and we illustrate these ideas with a worked-out example of linking financial and energy accounts.

Reading Time: 9 min.
Integrated Energy Accounting is keeping track and reporting on an entity’s detailed energy footprint (primary inputs, transformations and waste generation) not as an addendum to financial accounting and reporting but as a deeply-linked extension that is subject to the same level of rigor. The central design is the use of multidimensional double-entry bookkeeping which tracks additional quantitative information characterizing economic objects beyond their monetary values. This choice ensures the enforcement of both classic balance sheet constraints and the applicable energy conservation laws.
White Paper 12, Deep-Linking Financial and Energy Accounting

White Paper 12, Deep-Linking Financial and Energy Accounting

Reading Time: 1 min.
Open Risk White Paper 12: Deep-Linking Financial and Energy Accounting We develop a conceptual framework for integrated accounting that produces (where possible) non-financial disclosures subject to the same double-entry balance constraints as those used to produce conventional financial statements and automatically ensures any additional conservation laws are satisfied. We identify the key ingredients required for such a rigorous integrated accounting framework, in terms of concepts, postulates and design choices. Our focus and concrete use case is built around energy accounting, keeping track on an entity’s detailed energy footprint (primary inputs, transformations and waste generation) as an extension of its standard financial accounting and reporting.
Input-Output Models as Graph Networks

Input-Output Models as Graph Networks

We discuss the relation of economic input-output models with graph theory and networks

Reading Time: 15 min.
Motivation Fig 1. An economic network as a graph. The economy is a complex tangle of various agents that interact via transactions (sales and purchases) and contracts (lending, investing). In recent times more and more techniques from graph theory and network science are brought to bear on economic analysis. On the other hand, ever since the seminal contributions of Leontief, Input-Output Models (IO) have been widely used to describe economic relationships between economic actors (e.
Open Risk Academy Course: Input-Output Models with Python

Open Risk Academy Course: Input-Output Models with Python

A DeepDive Course into using Python to work with Input-Output Models

Reading Time: 2 min.
What are Input-Output Models? Environmentally Extended Multi-Regional Input-Output (EE-MRIO) tables describe economic relationships of economic actors (e.g. industrial sectors) operating within and between regions and their environmental repercussions. An EE MRIO augments the more basic and historically first proposed Input-Output Models (IO) with additional datasets and/or modeling assumptions in order to provide insights into the environmental foorprint of economic activity. Presently, the emphasis on negative externalities of economic activity (e.g., climate change, biodiversity loss) turns EE MRIO models into a useful conceptual and analytic tool.
White Paper 10, Concentration, diversity in economic networks

White Paper 10, Concentration, diversity in economic networks

Reading Time: 1 min.
Open Risk White Paper 10: Connecting the Dots: Concentration, diversity, inequality and sparsity in economic networks In this second Open Risk White Paper on Connecting the Dots we examine measures of concentration, diversity, inequality and sparsity in the context of economic systems represented as network (graph) structures. We adopt a stylized description of economies as property graphs and illustrate how relevant concepts can be represented in this language. We explore in some detail data types representing economic network data and their statistical nature which is critical in their use in concentration analysis.
Connecting the Dots: Concentration, diversity, inequality and sparsity in economic networks

Connecting the Dots: Concentration, diversity, inequality and sparsity in economic networks

In this second Open Risk White Paper on "Connecting the Dots" we examine measures of concentration, diversity, inequality and sparsity in the context of economic systems represented as network (graph) structures.

Reading Time: 6 min.
Concentration, diversity, inequality and sparsity in the context of economic networks In this second Open Risk White Paper on Connecting the Dots we examine measures of concentration, diversity, inequality and sparsity in the context of economic systems represented as network (graph) structures. We adopt a stylized description of economies as property graphs and illustrate how relevant concepts can represent in this language. We explore in some detail data types representing economic network data and their statistical nature which is critical in their use in concentration analysis.
9 Ways Graphs Show Up in Data Science

9 Ways Graphs Show Up in Data Science

We explore a variety of distinct uses of graph structures in data science. We review various important graph types and sketch their linkages and relationships. The review provides an operational guide towards a better overall understanding of those powerful tools

Reading Time: 17 min.
Graphs seem to be everywhere in modern data science Graphs (and the related concept of Networks) have emerged from a relative mathematical and physics niche to an ubiquitous model for describing and interpreting various phenomena. While the scholarly account of how this came about would probably need a dedicated book, there is no doubt that one of the key factors that increased the visibility of the graph concept is the near universal adoption of digital social networks.
Monte Carlo Simulation of the US Electoral College

Monte Carlo Simulation of the US Electoral College

Using a simplified version of the rules of the US Electoral College system we illustrate how the use of Monte Carlo techniques allows exploring systems that show combinatorial explosion

Reading Time: 9 min.
The role of simulation in risk management and decision support A Simulation is a simplified imitation of a process or system that represents with some fidelity its operation over time. In the context of risk management and decision support simulation can be a very powerful tool as it allows us to assess potential outcomes in a systematic way and explore what-if questions in ways that might otherwise be not feasible. Simulation is used when the underlying model is too complex to yield explicit analytic models (An analytic model is one can be “solved” exactly or with standard numerical methods, for example resulting in a formula).
Federated Credit Systems, Part One: Unbundling the Credit Provision Business Model

Federated Credit Systems, Part One: Unbundling the Credit Provision Business Model

In this Open Risk White Paper, the first in a series of three, we introduce and explore the concept of federated credit systems as a potentially interesting domain for the application of federated analysis and federated learning.

Reading Time: 1 min.
Federated Credit Systems, Part I: Unbundling the Credit Provision Business Model As an architectural design and information technology approach, federation has received increased attention in domains such as the medical sector (under the name federated analysis), in official statistics (under the name trusted data) and in mass computing devices (smartphones), under the name federated learning. In this (the first of series of three) white paper, we introduce and explore the concept of federated credit systems.
White Paper 09, Federated Credit Systems, Unbundling Credit Provision

White Paper 09, Federated Credit Systems, Unbundling Credit Provision

Reading Time: 1 min.
Open Risk White Paper 9: Federated Credit Systems, Part I: Unbundling The Credit Provision Business Model In this (the first of series of three) white paper, we introduce and explore the concept of federated credit systems. We review the rapidly developing fields of Federated Analysis and Federated Learning as already actively studied in the domains of medicine and consumer computing devices. This forms the backdrop for understanding the potential and challenges of applying similar concepts in finance and more particular credit provision.
New Open Risk Academy Course: Introduction to Geojson

New Open Risk Academy Course: Introduction to Geojson

Reading Time: 2 min.
Course Content This course is a CrashProgram (short course) introducing the GeoJSON specification for the encoding of geospatial features. The course is at an introductory technical level. It requires some familiarity with data specifications such as JSON and a very basic knowledge of Python Who Is This Course For The course is useful to: Any developer or data scientist that wants to work with geospatial features encoded in the geojson format How Does The Course Help Mastering the course content provides background knowledge towards the following activities:
New Open Risk Academy Course: Simulation of Credit Contagion

New Open Risk Academy Course: Simulation of Credit Contagion

Reading Time: 2 min.
Course Content This course is an introduction to the concept of credit contagion. It covers the following topics: Contagion Risk Overview and Definition Various Contagion Types and Modelling Challenges The Simple Contagion Model by Davis and Lo Supply Chains Contagion Sovereign Contagion Who Is This Course For The course is useful to: Risk Analysts across the financial industry and beyond Risk Management students Quantitative Risk Managers developing or validating risk models How Does The Course Help Mastering the course content provides background knowledge towards the following activities: