7 Andy has been an advocate of the idea that economists should communicate more with, and ideally learn more from, ‘proper’ scientists, and that some of the tools employed by biologists and engineers could be deployed in the financial sphere, too.
His work on financial networks is motivated by the intuition that financial crises spread pretty much like diseases, through contagion mechanisms that depend on the nature and structure of the linkages between banks. 8, 9 A key message from Andy’s work is that network complexity can be good or bad for financial stability.