Related papers: Spreadsheets and the Financial Collapse
Errors in spreadsheet applications and models are alarmingly common (some authorities, with justification cite spreadsheets containing errors as the norm rather than the exception). Faced with this body of evidence, the auditor can be faced…
Banking system crises are complex events that in a short span of time can inflict extensive damage to banks themselves and to the external economy. The crisis literature has so far identified a number of distinct effects or channels that…
The instability of the financial system as experienced in recent years and in previous periods is often linked to credit defaults, i.e., to the failure of obligors to make promised payments. Given the large number of credit contracts, this…
In normal times, it is assumed that financial institutions operating in non-overlapping sectors have complementary and distinct outcomes, typically reflected in mostly uncorrelated outcomes and asset returns. Such is the reasoning behind…
This essay suggests that a proper assessment of the presently unfolding financial crisis, and its cure, requires going back at least to the late 1990s, accounting for the cumulative effect of the ITC, real-estate and financial derivative…
The global financial system can be represented as a large complex network in which banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions are interconnected to each other through visible and invisible financial linkages. Recently, a lot of…
Accuracy in spreadsheet modelling systems can be reduced due to difficulties with the inputs, the model itself, or the spreadsheet implementation of the model. When the "true" outputs from the system are unknowable, accuracy is evaluated…
Systemic liquidity risk, defined by the IMF as "the risk of simultaneous liquidity difficulties at multiple financial institutions", is a key topic in macroprudential policy and financial stress analysis. Specialized models to simulate…
Spreadsheets are software programs which are typically created by end-users and often used for business-critical tasks. Many studies indicate that errors in spreadsheets are very common. Thus, a number of vendors offer auditing tools which…
Spreadsheets are ubiquitous in business with the financial sector particularly heavily reliant on the technology. It is known that the level of spreadsheet error can be high and that it is often necessary to review spreadsheets based on a…
Most organizations today use spreadsheets in some form or another to support critical business processes. However the financial resources, and developmental rigor dedicated to them are often minor in comparison to other enterprise…
A huge amount of data is everyday managed in large organizations in many critical business sectors with the support of spreadsheet applications. The process of elaborating spreadsheet data is often performed in a distributed, collaborative…
In this paper, we report some on-going focused research, but are further keen to set it in the context of a proposed bigger picture, as follows. There is a certain depressing pattern about the attitude of industry to spreadsheet error…
As economic entities become increasingly interconnected, a shock in a financial network can provoke significant cascading failures throughout the system. To study the systemic risk of financial systems, we create a bi-partite banking…
In traditional usability studies, researchers talk to users of tools to understand their needs and challenges. Insights gained via such interviews offer context, detail, and background. Due to costs in time and money, we are beginning to…
The fragility of financial systems was starkly demonstrated in early 2023 through a cascade of major bank failures in the United States, including the second, third, and fourth largest collapses in the US history. The highly interdependent…
We have conducted an empirical investigation into the long term survival rates of some small but representative samples of the 30,000 largest UK limited companies. These companies were either a control or known to have used, or been…
Previous research on spreadsheet risks has predominantly focussed on errors inadvertently introduced by spreadsheet writers i.e. it focussed on the end-user aspects of spreadsheet development. When analyzing a faulty spreadsheet, one might…
This management paper looks at the real world issues faced by practitioners managing spreadsheets through the production phase of their life cycle. It draws on the commercial experience of several developers working with large corporations,…
The research presented in this paper establishes a valid, and simplified, revision of previous spreadsheet error classifications. This investigation is concerned with the results of a web survey and two web-based gender and domain-knowledge…