A Multi-Layer Network Of the Sovereign Securities Market
The series Working Papers on Economics is published by the Office for Economic Studies at the Banco de la República (Central Bank of Colombia). The works published are provisional, and their authors are fully responsible for the opinions expressed in them, as well as for possible mistakes. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Banco de la República or its Board of Directors.
We study the network of Colombian sovereign securities settlements. With data from the settlement market infrastructure we study financial institutions’ transactions from three different trading and registering individual networks that we combine into a multi-layer network. Examining this network of networks enables us to confirm that (i) studying isolated single-layer trading and registering networks yields a misleading perspective on the relations between and risks induced by participating financial institutions; (ii) a multi-layer approach produces a connective structure consistent with most real-world networks (e.g. sparse, inhomogeneous, and clustered); and (iii) the multi-layer network is a multiplex that preserves the main connective features of its constituent layers due to positively correlated multiplexity. The results highlight the importance of mapping and understanding how financial institutions relate to each other across multiple financial environments, and the value of financial market infrastructures as sources of data that may help to overcome the main obstacles for working on multi-layer financial networks.
The opinions and statements are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not represent neither those of Banco de la República nor of its Board of Directors. Any remaining errors are our own.
