Short Profile:

Stefano Battiston is SNF Professor at the Department of Banking and Finance of the University of Zurich. His work applies the complex networks approach both to the empirical analysis of large economic networks and the modelling of their dynamics. Since several years, his main interests have been financial contagion, default cascades, and propagation of financial distress, where he combines the insights from the statistical mechanics of networks with the analysis of economic incentives.

He 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 was the coordinator of the FET project SIMPOL that investigates policy modeling in finance and climate finance. From 2015 he also coordinates 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.