Affiliation

Stefano Battiston is SNF Professor at the Department of Banking and Finance of the University of Zurich.

Primary Research Focus

Financial networks, socio-economic networks, financial contagion, default cascades, propagation of financial distress

Contribution

Stefano Battiston’s work applies the complex networks approach both to the empirical analysis of large economic networks and the modelling of their dynamics. In his work, he combines the insights from the statistical mechanics of networks with the analysis of economic incentives.

Exemplary Paper

Kaushik, R.; Battiston, S.: Credit default swaps drawup networks: too interconnected to be stable? PLOS ONE 8, e61815, 2013.

The paper is available here.

Education

Professor Battiston received his Master Degree in Neuroscience from the Brandeis University, Massachusetts, and his PhD in Physics from the Eurobios and Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris. Before becoming the SNF Professor at the Department of Banking and Finance of the University of Zurich, he was a Senior Researcher at the Chair of Systems Design at the ETH Zurich.

Publications

Stefano Battiston has published in the leading journals of his research field, including PloS-ONE, Nature Physics, and the Journal of Statistical Physics.

Misc.

Stefano Battiston has been involved in many international projects, including FOC (Forecasting Financial Crises) the first European project aimed at anticipating structural instabilities in the global financial networks. He is now the coordinator of the FET project SIMPOL that investigates policy modeling in finance and climate finance. From 2015 he will also coordinate the FET project DOLFINS that investigates how to better channel finance towards sustainable economy in a networked economy. Within the Financial Stability Program directed by the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and funded by the Institute of New Economic Thinking, Stefano Battiston coordinates the Working Group on Financial Networks. Stefano Battiston also serves as a referee and editor for the disciplines top journals.