Robust and sparse banking network estimation

Our empirical analysis focuses on estimating the dependence structure of a sample of European banks from credit default swap data. We observe that the presence of communities in the banking network plays an important role in terms of systemic risk and contagion dynamics. We also introduce a decomposition of strength centrality that allows us to better characterize the role of each bank in the network and to identify the most relevant channels for the transmission of financial distress.