In this paper, we gather together the minimum units of Bitcoin identity (the individual addresses), and group them into approximations of business entities, what we call “super clusters”.

Why do retail consumers look for P2P financial intermediation? Are internet-based peer-to-peer (P2P) loans a substitute for or a complement to bank loans? In this study we answer these questions by comparing P2P lending with the non-construction consumer credit market in Germany.

Back to 2008, Nakamoto combined the distributed ledger technology with cryptography and gave origin to what is now known as blockchain technology. The blockchain technology allows for a trustworthy record of transactions among anonymous without the need of a neutral central authority.

The notion of an entirely digital form of money has captured the curiosity of economists, computer scientists, and philosophers alike from the time the computer was still young.

The report describes the ongoing innovations in the financial sector brought about by digital currencies from a multi-level perspective: systemic, technical, legal, and industrial.

Systemic risk in banking systems is a crucial issue that remains to be completely addressed. In our toy model, banks are exposed to two sources of risks, namely, market risk from their investments in assets external to the system and credit risk from their lending in the interbank market.

This paper approaches the PPP puzzle by using the Bitcoin/US Dollar exchange rate. The use of the virtual currency as macroeconomic laboratory allows us to remove frictions that previously impeded the empirical demonstration of the law of one price.

This paper provides a mapping from portfolio risk diversification into the pairwise correlation between portfolios.

The excessive increase of leverage, i.e. the abuse of debt financing, is considered one of the primary factors in the default of financial institutions since it amplifies potential investment losses. On the other side, portfolio diversification acts to mitigate these losses.

We develop a model that captures, at the same time, the temporal dynamics of single-firm credit risk and the contagion across banks via a network of obligations and common assets.

The Thesis investigates from a theoretical perspective the relationship between leverage, diversification and systemic risk. Moving from the folk wisdom that asset diversification enhances financial stability by dispersing credit risks, we contribute to the debate shedding light on a critical facet of this strategy.

Systemic risk, here meant as the risk of default of a large portion of the financial system, depends on the network of financial exposures among institutions. However, there is no widely accepted methodology to determine the systemically important nodes in a network.

This paper contributes to a growing literature on the pitfalls of diversification by shedding light on a new mechanism under which, full risk diversification can be suboptimal.