  A growing body of studies on systemic risk in financial markets has
emphasized the key importance of taking into consideration the complex
interconnections among financial institutions. Much effort has been put in
modeling the contagion dynamics of financial shocks, and to assess the
resilience of specific financial markets - either using real network data,
reconstruction techniques or simple toy networks. Here we address the more
general problem of how shock propagation dynamics depends on the topological
details of the underlying network. To this end we consider different realistic
network topologies, all consistent with balance sheets information obtained
from real data on financial institutions. In particular, we consider networks
of varying density and with different block structures, and diversify as well
in the details of the shock propagation dynamics. We confirm that the systemic
risk properties of a financial network are extremely sensitive to its network
features. Our results can aid in the design of regulatory policies to improve
the robustness of financial markets.
