Sabbatical Seminar

Title: 

Self-Organized Business Networks

Speaker: Claudio Tebaldi* 

Università Bocconi, Department of Finance 

and Baffi Fintech Lab

Abstract: Business networks lie at the core of Europe’s corporate industrial organization. Web 3.0 blockchain technologies and tokenization promise to reshape these production networks by improving coordination, transparency, and information sharing. In the first part of the talk, I will present research outcomes from the MUSA Spoke 4 Fintech project, focusing on the design and implementation of B-Ledger, an open-source Web 3.0 platform that introduces an accounting framework for business networks. This digital infrastructure expands the contract space available to stakeholders in decentralized organizations and can be leveraged to implement more efficient and sustainable governance and financing solutions. The second part of the talk analyzes the propagation of financial distress cascades within business networks, focusing on their impact on credit risk pricing and management, and on the role of digital-ledger technologies in strengthening distress-resolution mechanisms.

*  Part of this research was conducted while the author was a visiting researcher at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ECB. An extensive description of the results obtained within the MUSA Spoke 4 Fintech project is available on the Baffi Fintechlab-wiki. The talk draws on a monograph by the same author, with the same title, conditionally accepted for publication by Cambridge University Press, as well as on a selection of related papers and preprints available on the author’s SSRN page.