Regulation of systemic risk through contributory endogenous agent-based modeling

Abstract

The Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) was created to identify and respond to emerging threats to the stability of the U.S. financial system. The research arm of the FSOC, the Office of Financial Research, has begun to explore agent-based models (ABMs) for measuring the emergent threat of systemic risk. We propose an ABM-based regulatory structure that incentivizes the honest participation and data contribution of regulated firms while providing clarity into the actions of the firms as endogenous to the market and driving emergent behavior. We build this scheme onto an existing ABM of a single-asset market to examine whether the structure of this scheme could provide its own benefits to market stabilization. We find that without regulatory intervention, markets acting within this proposed structure experience fewer bankruptcies and lower leverage buildup while returning larger profits for the same amount of risk.