This paper is aimed at investigating the effects of government intervention through unemployment benefits on macroeconomic dynamics in an agent based decentralized matching framework. The major result is that the presence of such a public intervention in the economy stabilizes the aggregate demand and the financial conditions of the system at the cost of a modest increase of both the inflation rate and the ratio between public deficit and nominal GDP. The successful action of the public sector is sustained by the central bank which is committed to buy outstanding government securities.

Using a unique dataset of 50 listed companies that meet the majority of the OECD requirements for social impact investments, we construct a social impact finance stock index and investigate how investing in social impact firms can contribute to portfolio risk-return performance. We build portfolios with three different methodologies (naïve, Markowitz mean-variance optimization, GARCH-copula model), and we study the performance in terms of returns, Sharpe ratio, utility, and forecast premium based on a constant relative risk aversion function for investors with different levels of risk aversion. Consistent with the idea that social impact investment can improve portfolio risk-return performance, the results of our macro asset allocation analysis show the importance of a large fraction of investor portfolios’ stake committed to social impact investments.

The general consensus on the need to enhance the resilience of the financial system has led to the imposition of higher capital requirements for certain institutions, supposedly based on their contribution to systemic risk. Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs) are divided into buckets based on their required additional capital buffers ranging from 1% to 3.5%. We measure the marginal contribution to systemic risk of 26 G-SIBs using the Distressed Insurance Premium methodology proposed by Huang et al. (J Bank Financ 33:2036–2049, 2009) and examine ranking consistency with that using the SRISK of Acharya et al. (Am Econ Rev 102:59–64, 2012). We then compare the bucketing using the two academic approaches and supervisory buckets. Because it leads to capital surcharges, bucketing should be consistent, irrespective of methodology. Instead, discrepancies in the allocation between buckets emerge and this suggests the complementary use of other methodologies.