Resilience and protective factors in a Midwestern community : a participatory action approach

Resilience is a systemic process between a person and his/her environment (Ungar, 2005), whereby a person demonstrates a pattern of “good outcome despite serious threats to adaptation or development” (Masten, 2001, p. 28). Despite much research, the resilience research field lacks consensus on specific definitions of resilience factors (Ungar et al., 2005). Therefore, it is recommended that research prioritize specific resilience variables (Luthar & Zelazo, 2003) while attending to contextual and systemic factors (Ungar, 2005). The study took place in a community center in a low SES, predominantly African-American neighborhood in the Midwest. Neighborhood residents worked with research team members to co-construct a local definition of youth resilience through focus groups. Children meeting this definition were nominated by staff and participated in interviews about resilience factors. Children, parents, and staff also completed rating scales measuring resilient youth’s academic, behavioral, social, and emotional functioning. Qualitative examinations of data resulted in an ecosystemic model of resilient youth in the community. Resilience was found to be influenced by interactions between individual, familial, and community factors. Individual perseverance and adult involvement and awareness, as well as community cohesion were important protective factors identified by participants. Results of the study were shared with community center staff with plans to utilize them at the center to help promote positive youth functioning.Department of Counseling Psychology and Guidance ServicesThesis (Ph. D.

A Network Model of Financial System Resilience

We examine the role of macroeconomic fluctuations, asset market liquidity, and network structure in determining contagion and aggregate losses in a financial system. Systemic instability is explored in a financial network comprising three distinct, but interconnected, sets of agents – domestic banks, international financial institutions, and firms. Calibrating the model to advanced country banking sector data, we obtain sensible aggregate loss distributions which are bimodal in nature. We demonstrate how systemic crises may occur and analyze how our results are influenced by firesale externalities and the feedback effects from curtailed lending in the macroeconomy. We also illustrate the resilience of our model financial system to stress scenarios with sharply rising corporate default rates and falling asset prices.Contagion, Financial crises, Network models, Systemic risk

Epidemics of Liquidity Shortages in Interbank Markets

Financial contagion from liquidity shocks has being recently ascribed as a prominent driver of systemic risk in interbank lending markets. Building on standard compartment models used in epidemics, in this work we develop an EDB (Exposed-Distressed-Bankrupted) model for the dynamics of liquidity shocks reverberation between banks, and validate it on electronic market for interbank deposits data. We show that the interbank network was highly susceptible to liquidity contagion at the beginning of the 2007/2008 global financial crisis, and that the subsequent micro-prudential and liquidity hoarding policies adopted by banks increased the network resilience to systemic risk---yet with the undesired side effect of drying out liquidity from the market. We finally show that the individual riskiness of a bank is better captured by its network centrality than by its participation to the market, along with the currently debated concept of "too interconnected to fail"

The systemic and global dimension of business resilience in a socio-technical perspective

This paper proposes to augment the concept of a business resilience improving process by enlarging such a process with a dimension of external action that addresses the vaster frame of systemic resilience of our societies. To this aim, I propose to widen the concept of socio-technical system (STS) to human societies, based on the idea that the development and survival of human societies has necessary social and technical factors. I also propose a concept of resilience in terms of dealing with failures of STS. Two particular cases of very large failure avoidance are considered: nuclear war and civilizational collapse, and I propose that such cases should be present in the referred dimension of external action of any business resilience program. Because the action of public governments and their cooperation is crucial for advancing global systemic resilience, I suggest that businesses should analyze and model the decisions of governments in a wider context of naturally occurring cooperating and conflicting human groups.I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for criticisms that allowed me to sharpen the generalized concept of socio-technical system and to fuse a general concept of global resilience with business resilience. This paper was financially supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT-Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Macroprudential policy and bank systemic risk

This paper investigates the effectiveness of macroprudential policy to contain the systemicrisk of European banks between 2000 and 2017. We use a new database (MaPPED) collected by experts at the ECB and national central banks with narrative informationon a broad range of instruments which are tracked over their life cycle. Using a dynamicpanel framework at a monthly frequency we assess the impact of macroprudential tools and their design on the banks’ systemic risk both in the short and the long run. We furthermore decompose the systemic risk measure in an individual bank risk component and a systemic linkage component. This is of particular interest because microprudential policy focuses on the tail risk of an individual bank while macroprudential policy targets systemic risk by addressing the interlinkages and common exposures across banks. In general, the announcements of macroprudential policy actions have a downward effect on bank systemic risk. On average, all banks benefit from macroprudential tools in terms oftheir individual risk. We find that credit growth tools and exposure limits exhibit the most pronounced downward effect on the individual risk component. However, we find evidence for a risk-shifting effect which is more pronounced for retail-oriented banks. The effects are heterogeneous across banks with respect to the systemic linkage component. Liquidity tools and measures aimed at increasing the resilience of banks decrease the systemic linkage of banks. Moreover, these tools appear to be most effective for distressed banks.Our results have implications for the optimal design of macroprudential instruments

FRAM for systemic accident analysis: a matrix representation of functional resonance

Due to the inherent complexity of nowadays Air Traffic Management (ATM) system, standard methods looking at an event as a linear sequence of failures might become inappropriate. For this purpose, adopting a systemic perspective, the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) originally developed by Hollnagel, helps identifying non-linear combinations of events and interrelationships. This paper aims to enhance the strength of FRAM-based accident analyses, discussing the Resilience Analysis Matrix (RAM), a user-friendly tool that supports the analyst during the analysis, in order to reduce the complexity of representation of FRAM. The RAM offers a two dimensional representation which highlights systematically connections among couplings, and thus even highly connected group of couplings. As an illustrative case study, this paper develops a systemic accident analysis for the runway incursion happened in February 1991 at LAX airport, involving SkyWest Flight 5569 and USAir Flight 1493. FRAM confirms itself a powerful method to characterize the variability of the operational scenario, identifying the dynamic couplings with a critical role during the event and helping discussing the systemic effects of variability at different level of analysis

Resilience of Locally Routed Network Flows: More Capacity is Not Always Better

In this paper, we are concerned with the resilience of locally routed network flows with finite link capacities. In this setting, an external inflow is injected to the so-called origin nodes. The total inflow arriving at each node is routed locally such that none of the outgoing links are overloaded unless the node receives an inflow greater than its total outgoing capacity. A link irreversibly fails if it is overloaded or if there is no operational link in its immediate downstream to carry its flow. For such systems, resilience is defined as the minimum amount of reduction in the link capacities that would result in the failure of all the outgoing links of an origin node. We show that such networks do not necessarily become more resilient as additional capacity is built in the network. Moreover, when the external inflow does not exceed the network capacity, selective reductions of capacity at certain links can actually help averting the cascading failures, without requiring any change in the local routing policies. This is an attractive feature as it is often easier in practice to reduce the available capacity of some critical links than to add physical capacity or to alter routing policies, e.g., when such policies are determined by social behavior, as in the case of road traffic networks. The results can thus be used for real-time monitoring of distance-to-failure in such networks and devising a feasible course of actions to avert systemic failures.Comment: Accepted to the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 201