Excerpts from my PhD research agenda...

I believe that the economy is best described as a complex adaptive system whose agents, whether firms or consumers, are constantly in flux and engaging in economic activity as part of a highly inter-connected network. The directed or undirected links between economic agents form a variety of network topologies that in the real world take the form of supply chains, lending relationships, trading networks, and so on. In such complex adaptive systems the underlying network topology is a driving force behind the aggregate system dynamics.  While I believe that networks play a central role in many different facets of the economy, for my PhD I am interested in studying how the underlying topologies of economic networks affect the diffusion of liquidity.  During my first year, I anticipate focusing my research on developing models of inter-bank network formation.  I haven't decided exactly how I will go about this...but I will probably draw from both random network formation models and strategic/game theoretic network formation models.  Year two will focus on diffusion of liquidity, and in year three I hope to build a computational model of the formation/diffusion process and then compare the results to empirical data.