Contagion in an interacting economy

Abstract

We investigate the credit risk model defined in Hatchett & K\"{u}hn under more general assumptions, in particular using a general degree distribution for sparse graphs. Expanding upon earlier results, we show that the model is exactly solvable in the $N\rightarrow \infty$ limit and demonstrate that the exact solution is described by the message-passing approach outlined by Karrer and Newman, generalized to include heterogeneous agents and couplings. We provide comparisons with simulations of graph ensembles with power-law degree distributions.