Economic Networks

This book provides a mathematically rigorous and unified treatment of economic networks. It covers foundational theory and important applications, ranging from production networks and supply constraints to optimal transport and financial crises. The book includes open-source code for computational modeling.

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It has become increasingly clear that economies can fruitfully be viewed as networks, consisting of millions of nodes (households, firms, banks, etc.) connected by business, social, and legal relationships. These relationships shape many outcomes that economists often measure. Over the past few years, research on production networks has flourished, as economists try to understand supply-side dynamics, default cascades, aggregate fluctuations, and many other phenomena. Economic Networks provides a brisk introduction to network analysis that is self-contained, rigorous, and illustrated with many figures, diagrams and listings with computer code. Network methods are put to work analyzing production networks, financial networks, and other related topics (including optimal transport, another highly active research field). Visualizations using recent data bring key ideas to life.