Financial Networks -- Special Issue of Computational Management Science

I received a lovely message the other day from a Springer editor which said:

Dear Anna,

I just received my copy of the special issue on “Financial Networks” of Computational Management Science. I am impressed by the excellent outcome, and I would like to thank you very much for this outstanding piece of work. I am definitely convinced that this special issue will help the journal in its positive development and in the task to position itself as a journal of superior quality.

Once more my compliments and thankfulness for your collaboration.

With best wishes,

Christian

Christian Rauscher

Springer

Senior Editor, Business/Economics

How very thoughtful and how much appreciated was the above message. And I do concur, I think that the special issue is really great and below I display the cover of the journal double volume.

 

My editorial on this special issue can be accessed here. The list of papers and abstracts can be found here. What I especially like about this double volume is that it includes papers by both practitioners and academics and it is so nice to see that research on Financial Networks is continuing to fascinate!

As we say in academia, it may take a while, but good research rises to the top!

Financial Networks -- Putting a Special Issue to Bed

I have always been fascinated by networks from transportation and supply chains to electric power and the Internet.

Two decades ago, I began work on financial networks in a project that was funded through the USDA and involved Merritt Hughes (a UMass Amherst graduate alumna) and a former doctoral student of mine, who is now an award-winning Full Professor, Dr. June Dong.

Since a series of papers that we wrote I have periodically returned to the financial networks theme since I am a systems thinker and it is intriguing to see how money flows and to determine analogies between/among different network systems.

With Dr. Stavros Siokos, who was also a former PhD student of mine, and is now a renowned financier based in London, we wrote the book, Financial Networks: Statics and Dynamics, and it was published by Springer in 1997. In 2003, I edited the volume, Innovations in Financial and Economic Networks, and it was published by Edward Elgar Publishing.

The global economic and financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 brought further attention to financial networks, systemic risk, fragility and vulnerability issues, so our research (with now Dr. Patrick Qiang) also addressed the criticality of nodes and links (and their importance and ranking) in financial networks.

In 2008, I wrote a survey on financial networks which was published in the Handbook of Information Technology and Finance, edited by  D. Seese, C. Weinhard, and F. Schlottmann.

Invitations to speak on Financial Networks at conferences, including the Measuring Systemic Risk Conference at the University of Chicago in 2010, demonstrated the growing interest in viewing financial issues, problems, and relationships through a network prism with a focus on the system. Although those of us in operations research and the management sciences as well as in economics had realized this, the finance community was slower to recognize this.

So, when the invitation from the Editor of the journal, Computational Management Science, Professor Berc Rustem, came last Spring, to guest edit a special issue on Financial Networks, I agreed, and the call for papers went out with a deadline for submission of July 15, 2013.

I am pleased to report that the edited volume is now being "put to bed." The collection consists of 8 peer-reviewed papers, plus my editorial. The contributions are from academics and practitioners and cover such timely topics as stock market graphs with applications to the US stock market, Russia, and Sweden; financial contagion, dynamic network formation using game theory, financial network equilibria and corporate social responsibility as well as the co-evolution of supply chains and corporate financial networks with insolvency risk. Methodological approaches in the formulation, analysis, and computations include network and graph theory, statistics, game theory, and variational inequality theory.

I will let my readers know when the volume is published -- it will be a double volume and, in the meantime, you can find and read some of the preprints already in the Online First Articles.

Reviewers are essential to the quality of papers and I am so grateful to all those, who, although they remain anonymous, contributed so much with their helpful comments and suggestions to the authors on their original manuscripts and their subsequent  revisions.

Financial Networks -- Special Issue of Computational Management Science

Last December I very much enjoyed speaking on Financial Networks at the Measuring Systemic Risk Conference, organized by Lars Peter Hansen of the University of Chicago, Andrew W. Lo of the Sloan School at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and David Marshall of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

I wrote about the conference in a blogpost entitled, Oprah was not there and neither was George Clooney but Chicago still Sparkled with Intellectual Brilliance.

Recently, I received an invitation from the editor of the journal, Computational Management Science, Dr. Berc Rustem of Imperial College, to edit a Special Issue on Financial Networks.

This invitation I also could not refuse.

Below is a Call for Papers, which will also be posted shortly on the journal website.

Call for Papers

Special Issue of Computational Management Science

Financial Networks

Guest Editor:

Anna Nagurney

Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Areas of Interest

Networks are a powerful scientific framework for the modeling, analysis, and solution of complex economic, social, and management problems.

Financial networks, in particular, have evolved to become a theoretical and computational paradigm for a spectrum of decision-making problems from the micro to the macro levels, and ranging from portfolio optimization to systemic risk assessment, financial intermediation, contagion analysis, and even electronic finance.

This special issue of Computational Management Science seeks to capture the state-of-the-art of financial networks through high quality, original research papers that include numerical results.

Reviewing Information

The submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by anonymous reviewers according to the standards of a leading international journal.

Submission Information

The deadline for submission is July 15, 2012. Manuscripts must be written in English and conform to the style of the journal Computational Management Science and not exceed 25 pages.

Please submit manuscripts to:

http://www.editorialmanager.com/cmsc/

and select Article Type: S.I. Networks, to ensure proper processing.

If you have questions, the Guest Editor can be contacted at:

e-mail: nagurney@isenberg.umass.edu