Core-periphery decomposition

Interbank markets are tiered and operate in a hierarchical fashion. It is a well-known characteristic of these markets that many banks are dealing with only a small number of big institutions, while these big institutions are acting like intermediaries or money-center banks. These big institutions are considered to be the core of the network, and the others are the periphery.

Many papers focused on this characteristic of real-world networks. For example, Borgatti and Everett (1999) examined this phenomenon on a network made of citation data, and found three journals to be the members of the core. Craig and von Peter (2010) used this core/periphery structure for the German interbank market. Their findings suggest that bank-specific features help to explain how banks position themselves in the interbank market. There is a strong correlation between the size and position in the network. As tiering is not random but behavioral, there are economic reasons (for example...