Evolution of Cohesion between USA Financial Sector Companies before, during, and Post-Economic Crisis: Complex Networks Approach

Abstract

Various mathematical frameworks play an essential role in understanding the economic systems and the emergence of crises in them. Understanding the relation between the structure of connections between the system’s constituents and the emergence of a crisis is of great importance. In this paper, we propose a novel method for the inference of economic systems’ structures based on complex networks theory utilizing the time series of prices. Our network is obtained from the correlation matrix between the time series of companies’ prices by imposing a threshold on the values of the correlation coefficients. The optimal value of the threshold is determined by comparing the spectral properties of the threshold network and the correlation matrix. We analyze the community structure of the obtained networks and the relation between communities’ inter and intra-connectivity as indicators of systemic risk. Our results show how an economic system’s behavior is related to its structure and how the crisis is reflected in changes in the structure. We show how regulation and deregulation affect the structure of the system. We demonstrate that our method can identify high systemic risks and measure the impact of the actions taken to increase the system’s stability.