is something really wrong with macroeconomics while there is much that is wrong with macroeconomics today most critiques of the state of macroeconomics are off target current macroeconomic research is not mindless dsge modeling filled with ridiculous assumptions and oblivious of data rather young macroeconomists are doing vibrant varied and exciting work getting jobs and being published macroeconomics informs economic policy only moderately and not more nor all that differently than other fields in economics monetary policy has benefitted significantly from this advice in keeping inflation under control and preventing a new great depression macroeconomic forecasts perform poorly in absolute terms and given the size of the challenge probably always will but relative to the level of aggregation the time horizon and the amount of funding they are not so obviously worst than those in other fields what is most wrong with macroeconomics today is perhaps that there is too little discussion of which models to teach and too little investment in graduate level textbooks

explaining business cycles in small open economies abstract this paper analyzes the role of world price shocks fluctuations in the prices of capital intermediate and primary goods and in the world real interest rate in the generation and propagation of business cycles in small open developing countries i construct a stochastic dynamic multi sector small open economy model the model is a variant of the specific factors model and reflects the major structural characteristics of developing economies i utilize variance decomposition methods to quantitatively evaluate the impact of world price shocks the results indicate that world price shocks account for a significant fraction of business cycle variability in developing countries

does fiscal policy matter tax transfer and spend in a macro abm with capital and credit we investigate compare and contrast the emerging properties of a macroeconomic agent based model along the lines of assenza et al 2015 journal of economic dynamics and control 50 5 28 when the government experiments with different policy configurations i tax and transfer ii tax transfer and spend and iii the implementation of a fiscal rule such as a stylized stability and growth pact in some of the scenarios considered a remarkable property can be detected which we label the balanced budget emerging property the scale of activity in the aggregate gdp employment and unemployment rate is such that a balanced budget emerges spontaneously the strong implication of this property is that the fiscal authority is able to target gdp and the unemployment rate a result reminiscent of the blinder solow framework it is worth noting however that there are many departures from the rule which we have detected by carrying out the sensitivity analysis

the future of macroeconomics macro theory and models at the bank of england abstract the adoption as policy models by central banks of representative agent new keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models has been widely criticised including for their simplistic micro foundations at the bank of england the previous generation of policy models is seen in its 1999 medium term macro model mtmm instead of improving that model to correct its considerable flaws many shared by other non dsge policy models such as the federal reserve s frb us it was replaced in 2004 by the dsge based beqm though this clearly failed during and after the global financial crisis it was replaced in 2011 by the dsge compass complemented by a suite of models we provide a general critique of dsge models for explaining forecasting and policy analyses at central banks and suggest new directions for improving current empirical macroeconomic models based on empirical modelling broadly consistent with better theory rather than seeking to impose simplistic and unrealistic theory

empirical evidence on inflation expectations in the new keynesian phillips curve abstract we review the main identification strategies and empirical evidence on the role of expectations in the new keynesian phillips curve paying particular attention to the issue of weak identi

macroeconomics after the crisis time to deal with the pretense of knowledge syndrome the recent financial crisis has damaged the reputation of macroeconomics largely for its inability to predict the impending financial and economic crisis to be honest this inability to predict does not concern me much it is almost tautological that severe crises are essentially unpredictable for otherwise they would not cause such a high degree of distress what does concern me about my discipline is that its current core by which i mainly mean the so called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium approach has become so mesmerized with its own internal logic that it has begun to confuse the precision it has achieved about its own world with the precision that it has about the real one this is dangerous for both methodological and policy reasons to be fair to our field an enormous amount of work at the intersection of macroeconomics and corporate finance has been chasing many of the issues that played a central role during the current crisis including liquidity evaporation collateral shortages bubbles crises panics fire sales risk shifting contagion and the like however much of this literature belongs to the periphery of macroeconomics rather than to its core i will discuss the distinction between the core and the periphery of macroeconomics as well as the futile nature of the integrationist movement that is the process of gradually bringing the insights of the periphery into the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium structure i argue that the complexity of macroeconomic interactions limits the knowledge we can ever attain and that we need to place this fact at the center of our analysis we should consider what this complexity does to the actions and reactions of the economic agent and seek analytical tools and macroeconomic policies that are robust to the enormous uncertainty to which we are confined

do central banks respond to exchange rate movements a structural investigation abstract we estimate a small scale structural general equilibrium model of a small open economy using bayesian methods our main focus is the conduct of monetary policy in australia canada new zealand and the uk we consider generic taylor type rules where the monetary authority reacts in response to output inflation and exchange rate movements we perform posterior odds tests to investigate the hypothesis whether central banks do target exchange rates the main result of this paper is that the central banks of australia and new zealand do not whereas the bank of canada and the bank of england do include the nominal exchange rate in its policy rule this result is robust for various specification of the policy rule we also find that terms of trade movements do not contribute significantly to domestic business cycles

sources procedures and microeconomic effects of innovation fabio arcangeli paul david frank engelman christopher freeman massimo moggi richard nelson luigi orsenigo nathan rosenberg michele salvati g n von tunzelman two anonymous referees and the participants at the meeting of the committee on distribution growth and technical progress of the italian national research council cnr rome november 16 1985 have helped with various redraftings a particularly grateful acknowledgment is for the insightful and patient help of moses abramovitz this work has been undertaken at the science policy research unit spru university of sussex as part of the research program of the designated research centre sponsored by the economic and social research council esrc earlier support to the research that led to this paper by the italian national research council cnr is also gratefully acknowledged the statistical research has been undertaken with the assistance of stephano brioschi ilaria fornari and giovannu prennushi

forming priors for dsge models and how it affects the assessment of nominal rigidities abstract we discuss prior elicitation for the parameters of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge models and provide a method for constructing prior distributions for a subset of these parameters from beliefs about steady state relationships and second moments of the endogenous variables the empirical application documents how the specification of the prior distribution affects our assessment of the relative importance of price and wage rigidities in a new keynesian dsge model

fiscal and monetary policies in complex evolving economies what is the most appropriate combination of fiscal and monetary policies in economies subject to banking crises and deep recessions we study this issue using an agent based model that is able to reproduce a wide array of macro and micro empirical regularities simulation results suggest that policy mixes associating unconstrained counter cyclical fiscal policy and monetary policy targeting employment is required to stabilise the economy we also show that discipline guided fiscal rules can be self defeating as they depress the economy without improving public finances finally we find that the effects of monetary and fiscal policies become sharper as the level of income inequality increases

gmm estimation of the new phillips curve abstract this paper applies test statistics developed by stock and wright econometrica 68 2000 1055 to examine the two specifications of the new keynesian phillips curve in gali and gertler journal of monetary economics 44 1999 195 the new test statistics demonstrate the inadequacy of conventional gmm methodology by indicating two features that are neglected by gali and gertler observational equivalence in the baseline model and weak identification in the hybrid model

testing for indeterminacy an application to u s monetary policy reply this paper considers a prototypical new keynesian model in which the equilibrium is undetermined if monetary policy is passive the likelihood based estimation of dynamic equilibrium models is extended to allow for indeterminacies and sunspot fluctuations we construct posterior weights for the determinacy and indeterminacy region of the parameter space and estimates for the propagation of fundamental and sunspot shocks according to the estimated model u s monetary policy post 1982 is consistent with determinacy whereas the pre volcker policy is not we find that before 1979 indeterminacy substantially altered the propagation of shocks

post keynesian stock flow consistent modelling a survey the aim of the paper is to provide an overview of the current stock ow consistent sfc literature indeed we feel the sfc approach has recently led to a blossoming literature requiring a new summary after the work of dos santos and above all after the publication of the main reference work on the methodology godley and lavoie s monetary economics an integrated approach to credit money income production and wealth the paper is developed along the following lines first a brief historical analysis investigates the roots of this class of models that can be traced as far back as 1949 and the work of copeland second the competing points of view regarding some of its main controversial aspects are underlined and used to classify the different methodological approaches followed in using these models namely we discuss i how the models are solved ii the treatment of time and its implication and ii the need or not for microfoundations these results are then used in the third section of the paper to develop a bifocal perspective which allows us to divide the literature reviewed according to both its subject and the methodology we explore various topics such as financialisation exchange rate modelling policy implication the need for a common framework within the post keynesian literature and the empirical use of sfc models finally the conclusions present some hypotheses and wishes for the possible lines of development of sfc models

industrial dynamics fiscal policy and r d evidence from a computational experiment we present an agent based computational model in which bounded rational firms and workers trade on fully decentralized markets for final goods and labor by means of random matching protocols the model replicates several macroeconomic phenomena regularly observed in the data with aggregate features emerging from the localized interactions of individual entities the model is then used as a computational laboratory to run an experiment on the role of fiscal policy in increasing macroeconomic performance

a few counter factual hypotheses on the current economic crisis the economic and financial problems of the present devastating crisis are terribly practical sraffa s little book is highly theoretical to relate the two we must avoid stopping at keynes and include the whole group of economists around him in cambridge resuming the discussions that have been pushed into oblivion by the mainstream the capital theory controversy was not the only one here more relevant is the controversy on growth income distribution savings and profits between samuelson modigliani and kaldor pasinetti as a result a theorem associated with modigliani miller was brought to fame and hailed as the core of modern corporate finance its surprisingly wide acceptance is here harshly criticised and indicted of major responsibility for the present crisis inevitably this is argued through counter factual hypotheses yet even with less sophisticated analytical tools a framework does exist much nearer to common sense implying the needed flexibility and openness of mind for the major restructuring of financial institutions which today so clearly emerges as the major task to undertake copyright oxford university press

the role of the exchange rate in monetary policy rules for a country that chooses not to permanently fix its exchange rate through a currency board or a common currency or some kind of dollarization the only alternative monetary policy that can work well in the long run is one based on the trinity of i a flexible exchange rate ii an inflation target and iii a monetary policy rule while not often put into this threepart format the desirability of such a monetary policy in an open economy is in my view the clear implication of three corresponding strands of recent monetary research i research on fixed exchange rates regimes including the influential 1995 article the mirage of fixed exchange rates by maurice obstfeld and kenneth rogoff and the many analyses of the breakdown of fixed exchange rate regimes in the late 1990 s ii research on the practical success with inflation targeting by ben bernanke et al 1999 and iii research on the benefits of simple monetary policy rules see e g taylor 1999a this clear policy implication however does not end the debate about how exchange rates should be taken into account in formulating monetary policy even if one excludes capital controls and sterilized exchange market intervention from consideration because they are not effective or attractive ways to de link exchangerate movements from the domestic interest rate a crucial question remains how should the instruments of monetary policy the interest rate or a monetary aggregate react to the exchange rate should policymakers avoid any reaction and focus instead on domestic indicators such as inflation and real gdp or is the rule of thumb that a substantial appreciation of the real exchange rate furnishes a prima facie case for relaxing monetary policy as characterized by obstfeld and rogoff 1995 p 93 a better monetary policy rule or perhaps policymakers should heed the obstfeld rogoff warning that substantial departures from ppp purchasing power parity in the short run and even over decades make such a policy reaction to the exchange rate undesirable more generally if one accepts the trinity concept of monetary policy in an open economy then what is the role of the exchange rate in the monetarypolicy rule

when more flexibility yields more fragility the microfoundations of keynesian aggregate unemployment abstract wages are an element of cost crucially affecting the competitiveness of individual firms but the wage bill is also a crucial element of aggregate demand hence it could be that more flexible and fluid labour markets while allowing for faster inter firm reallocation of labour may also render the whole economic system more fragile more prone to recession and more volatile in this work we investigate some conditions under which such a conjecture applies the paper presents an agent based model that investigates the effects of two archetypes of capitalism in terms of regimes of labour governance defined by the mechanisms of wage determination firing labour protection and productivity gains sharing upon i labour market regularities and ii macroeconomic dynamics long term rates of growth gdp fluctuations unemployment rates inequality etc the model is built upon the keynes meets schumpeter family of models dosi et al 2010 explicitly incorporating different microfounded labour market regimes our results show that seemingly more rigid labour markets and labour relations are conducive to coordination successes leading to higher and smoother growth

optimal monetary policy in open versus closed economies an integrated approach in clarida et al 1999 hereafter cgg we presented a normative analysis of monetary policy within a simple optimization based closedeconomy framework we derived the optimal policy rule and among other things characterized the gains from commitment also we made precise the implications for the kind of instrument feedback rule that a central bank should follow in practice in this paper we show how our analysis extends to the case of a small open economy openness complicates the problem of monetary management to the extent the central bank must take into account the impact of the exchange rate on real activity and inflation how to factor the exchange rate into the overall design of monetary policy accordingly becomes a central consideration here we show that under certain conditions the monetary policy design problem for the small open economy is isomorphic to the problem of the closed economy that we considered earlier hence all our qualitative results for the closed economy carry over to this case openness does affect the parameters of the model suggesting quantitative implications though the general form of the optimal interest rate feedback rule remains the same as in the closedeconomy case for example how aggressively a central bank should adjust the interest rate in response to inflationary pressures depends on the degree of openness in addition openness gives rise to an important distinction between domestic inflation and consumer price inflation as defined by the cpi to the extent that there is perfect exchange rate pass through we find that the central bank should target domestic inflation and allow the exchange rate to float despite the impact of the resulting exchangerate variability on the cpi kosuki aoki 1999 gali and tommaso monacelli 2000

inequality leverage and crises the paper studies how high leverage and crises can arise as a result of changes in the income distribution empirically the periods 1920 1929 and 1983 2007 both exhibited a large increase in the income share of the rich a large increase in leverage for the remainder and an eventual financial and real crisis the paper presents a theoretical model where these features arise endogenously as a result of a shift in bargaining powers over incomes a financial crisis can reduce leverage if it is very large and not accompanied by a real contraction but restoration of the lower income group s bargaining power is more effective

end use technology choice in the national energy modeling system nems an analysis of the residential and commercial building sectors abstract the national energy modeling system nems is arguably the most influential energy model in the united states the u s energy information administration uses nems to generate the federal government s annual long term forecast of national energy consumption and to evaluate prospective federal energy policies nems is considered such a standard tool that other models are calibrated to its forecasts in both government and academic practice as a result nems has a significant influence over expert opinions of plausible energy futures nems is a massively detailed model whose inner workings despite its prominence receive relatively scant critical attention this paper analyzes how nems projects energy demand in the residential and commercial sectors in particular we focus on the role of consumers preferences and financial constraints investigating how consumers choose appliances and other end use technologies we identify conceptual issues in the approach the model takes to the same question across both sectors running the model with a range of consumer preferences we estimate the extent to which this issue impacts projected consumption relative to the baseline model forecast for final energy demand in the year 2035 in the residential sector the impact ranges from a decrease of 0 73 quads 6 0 to an increase of 0 24 quads 2 0 in the commercial sector the impact ranges from a decrease of 1 0 quads 9 0 to an increase of 0 99 quads 9 0

estimating new keynesian phillips curves a full information maximum likelihood approach abstract the new keynesian phillips curve has recently become an important ingredient in monetary policy models however using limited information methods the empirical support for the new keynesian phillips curve appear to be mixed this paper argues by means of monte carlo simulations with a simple new keynesian sticky price model that single equations methods e g gmm are likely to produce imprecise and biased estimates then it is argued that estimating the model with full information maximum likelihood fiml is a useful way of obtaining better estimates finally a version of the model used in the monte carlo simulations is estimated on u s data with fiml and although the pure forward looking new keynesian phillips curve is rejected a version with both forward and backward looking components provides a reasonable approximation of u s inflation dynamics

the current economic crisis its nature and the course of academic economics the current crisis has triggered significant debate concerning economic theory and policy largely absent from this debate is an informed discussion of the methods used by economists in analysing the economy and formulating their proposals but method matters here i argue that current academic research practices need to be transformed before real insight can be achieved specifically i indicate why and how a more grounded framework than that presupposed by current research practices facilitates a potentially more fruitful approach to understanding the crisis

the continuing muddles of monetary theory a steadfast refusal to face facts lionel robbins was concerned about the methodology of economic science when he discussed the relationship between theory and reality two of the examples of inappropriate relationships were taken from monetary economics such shortcomings continue among the worst are 1 is lm whereby the monetary authorities set the monetary base and the interest rate is market determined 2 the monetary base multiplier of bank deposits and the role of reserve ratios 3 the current three equation neoclassical consensus assuming perfect creditworthiness and hence no need for banks 4 the analysis of the evolution of money

rethinking macroeconomics what failed and how to repair it the standard macroeconomic models have failed by all the most important tests of scientific theory they did not predict that the financial crisis would happen and when it did they understated its effects monetary authorities allowed bubbles to grow and focused on keeping inflation low partly because the standard models suggested that low inflation was necessary and almost sufficient for efficiency and growth after the crisis broke policymakers relying on the models floundered notwithstanding the diversity of macroeconomics the sum of these failures points to the need for a fundamental re examination of the models and a reassertion of the lessons of modern general equilibrium theory that were seemingly forgotten in the years leading up to the crisis this paper first describes the failures of the standard models in broad terms and then develops the economics of deep downturns and shows that such downturns are endogenous further the paper argues that there have been systemic changes to the structure of the economy that made the economy more vulnerable to crisis contrary to what the standard models argued finally the paper contrasts the policy implications of our framework with those of the standard models

weak instrument robust tests in gmm and the new keynesian phillips curve we discuss weak instrument robust statistics in gmm for testing hypotheses on the full parameter vector or on subsets of the parameters we use these test procedures to reexamine the evidence on the new keynesian phillips curve model we find that u s postwar data are consistent with the view that inflation dynamics are predominantly forward looking but we cannot rule out the presence of considerable backward looking dynamics moreover the phillips curve has become flatter recently and this is an important factor contributing to its weak identification

budgetary rigour with stimulus in lean times policy advices from an agent based model abstract the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent global recession triggered a wide spread economic and political debate on the proper policy combination to deal with the crisis and to prevent similar ones in the future probably the main dispute has been around the use of fiscal instruments in order to foster growth while keeping public debt under control the european union for instance endorsed austerity measures for fiscal consolidation but has been sharply criticized by several scholars this paper aims at contributing to the current debate by presenting the outcomes of a computational study performed with the eurace agent based model we set up an experiment with two base policy scenarios i e stability and growth pact and fiscal compact incrementally enriching them with complementary policies which relax fiscal rigidity and introduce quantitative easing results show that budgetary rigour performs well if and only if some mechanisms of fiscal relaxation and monetary accommodation are considered during bad times thus confirming in a richer and more realistic model setting the fundamental tenet of keynesian economics about the importance of sustaining aggregate demand during recessions

a sparsity based model of bounded rationality this article defines and analyzes a sparse max operator which is a less than fully attentive and rational version of the traditional max operator the agent builds as economists do a simplified model of the world which is sparse considering only the variables of first order importance his stylized model and his resulting choices both derive from constrained optimization still the sparse max remains tractable to compute moreover the induced outcomes reflect basic psychological forces governing limited attention the sparse max yields a behavioral version of basic chapters of the microeconomics textbook consumer demand and competitive equilibrium i obtain a behavioral version of marshallian and hicksian demand arrow debreu competitive equilibrium the slutsky matrix the edgeworth box roy s identity and so on the slutsky matrix is no longer symmetric nonsalient prices are associated with anomalously small demand elasticities because the consumer exhibits nominal illusion in the edgeworth box the offer curve is a two dimensional surface rather than a one dimensional curve as a result different aggregate price levels correspond to materially distinct competitive equilibria in a similar spirit to a phillips curve the arrow debreu welfare theorems typically do not hold this framework provides a way to assess which parts of basic microeconomics are robust and which are not to the assumption of perfect maximization jel codes d01 d03 d11 d51

where modern macroeconomics went wrong this paper provides a critique of the dsge models that have come to dominate macroeconomics during the past quarter century it argues that at the heart of the failure were the wrong microfoundations which failed to incorporate key aspects of economic behaviour e g incorporating insights from information economics and behavioural economics inadequate modelling of the financial sector meant they were ill suited for predicting or responding to a financial crisis and a reliance on representative agent models meant they were ill suited for analysing either the role of distribution in fluctuations and crises or the consequences of fluctuations on inequality the paper proposes alternative benchmark models that may be more useful both in understanding deep downturns and responding to them

income distribution credit and fiscal policies in an agent based keynesian model this work studies the interactions between income distribution and monetary and fiscal policies in terms of ensuing dynamics of macro variables gdp growth unemployment etc on the grounds of an agent based keynesian model the direct ancestor of this work is the keynes meeting schumpeter formalism presented in dosi et al 2010 to that model we add a banking sector and a monetary authority setting interest rates and credit lending conditions the model combines keynesian mechanisms of demand generation a schumpeterian innovation fueled process of growth and minskian credit dynamics the robustness of the model is checked against its capability to jointly account for a large set of empirical regularities both at the micro level and at the macro one the model is able to catch salient features underlying the current as well as previous recessions the impact of financial factors and the role in them of income distribution we find that different income distribution regimes heavily affect macroeconomic performance more unequal economies are exposed to more severe business cycles fluctuations higher unemployment rates and higher probability of crises on the policy side fiscal policies do not only dampen business cycles reduce unemployment and the likelihood of experiencing a huge crisis in some circumstances they also affect positively long term growth further the more income distribution is skewed toward profits the greater the effects of fiscal policies about monetary policy we find a strong non linearity in the way interest rates affect macroeconomic dynamics in one regime with low rates changes in interest rates are ineffective up to a threshold beyond which increasing the interest rate implies smaller output growth rates and larger output volatility unemployment and likelihood of crises

how the world achieved consensus on monetary policy the worldwide progress in monetary policy is a great achievement and especially considering the situation 30 years ago a remarkable success story i describe how the world achieved a working consensus on the core principles of monetary policy by the late 1990s i survey the muddled state of affairs in the 1970s and then ask what happened in federal reserve policy to produce an understanding of the practical principles of monetary policy how did formal institutional support for targeting low inflation abroad follow from an international acceptance of these ideas and how did a consensus theoretical model develop in academia i explain how the modern theoretical consensus known alternatively as the new neoclassical synthesis or the new keynesian model of monetary policy reinforces key advances the priority for price stability the targeting of core rather than headline inflation the importance of credibility for low inflation and preemptive interest rate policy supported by transparent objectives and procedures of course a working consensus does not constitute complete agreement accordingly the conclusion identifies important monetary policy issues that remain to be explored

macroeconomies as constructively rational games real world decision makers are forced to be locally constructive that is their decisions are necessarily constrained by their interaction networks information beliefs and physical states this study transforms an otherwise standard dynamic macroeconomic model into an open ended dynamic game by requiring consumers and firms with intertemporal utility and profit objectives to be locally constructive tested locally constructive decision processes for the consumers and firms range from simple reactive reinforcement learning to adaptive dynamic programming adp computational experiments are used to explore macroeconomic performance under alternative decision process combinations relative to a social planner benchmark solution a key finding is that simpler decision processes can outperform more sophisticated decision processes such as adp however memory length permitting some degree of adaptive foresight is critical for good performance

a new approach to business fluctuations heterogeneous interacting agents scaling laws and financial fragility abstract in this paper we discuss a scaling approach to business fluctuations our starting point consists in recognizing that concepts and methods derived from physics have allowed economists to re discover a set of stylized facts which have to be satisfactorily accounted for in their models standard macroeconomics based on a reductionist approach centered on the representative agent is definitely badly equipped for this task on the contrary we show that a simple financial fragility agent based model based on complex interactions of heterogeneous agents is able to replicate a large number of scaling type stylized facts with a remarkable high degree of statistical precision

the international transmission of economic fluctuations abstract this paper suggests that for a wide class of international real business cycle models including models with imperfect competition the traditional channels of international transmission of business cycles through world interest rate and terms of trade variations cannot explain the cyclical response of the canadian economy to innovations in u s output empirically testable quantitative models of the effects on canadian economic activity of shocks to the u s economy are developed and their empirical relevance is tested by comparing impulse responses estimated from vector autoregressions to the quantitative predictions of the theoretical models

forecast errors in iea countries energy consumption every year energy policy of iea countries includes a forecast of the energy consumption in the member countries forecasts concerning the years 1985 1990 and 1995 can now be compared to the actual values the second oil crisis resulted in big positive forecast errors the oil price drop in 1986 did not have a similar opposite effect a correction for economic growth reduces forecast errors during the second oil crisis but not elsewhere industry has a relatively big positive forecast error while transportation has a negative forecast error even when the forecast error is small the results are not so nice because the small value is often the sum of large positive and negative errors almost no significant correlation is found between forecast errors in the 3 years correspondingly no significant correlation coefficient is found between forecast errors in the 3 main energy sectors therefore a relatively small forecast error is not caused by a relatively small forecast error in all 3 sectors

the financial accelerator in an evolving credit network we model a credit network characterized by credit relationships connecting i downstream d and upstream u firms and ii firms and banks the net worth of d firms is the driver of fluctuations the production of d firms and of their suppliers u firms in fact is constrained by the availability of internal finance proxied by net worth to the d firms the structure of credit interlinkages changes over time due to an endogeneous process of partner selection which leads to the polarization of the network at the aggregate level the distribution of growth rates exhibits negative skewness and excess kurtosis when a shock hits the macroeconomy or a significant group of agents in the credit network a bankruptcy avalanche can follow if agents leverage is critically high in a nutshell we want to explore the properties of a network based financial accelerator

income and wealth heterogeneity in the macroeconomy how do movements in the distribution of income and wealth affect the macroeconomy we analyze this question using a calibrated version of the stochastic growth model with partially uninsurable idiosyncratic risk and movements in aggregate productivity our main finding is that in the stationary stochastic equilibrium the behavior of the macroeconomic aggregates can be almost perfectly described using only the mean of the wealth distribution this result is robust to substantial changes in both parameter values and model specification our benchmark model whose only difference from the representative agent framework is the existence of uninsurable idiosyncratic risk displays far less cross sectional dispersion and skewness in wealth than u s data however an extension that relies on a small amount of heterogeneity in thrift does succeed in replicating the key features of the wealth data furthermore this extension features aggregate time series that depart significantly from permanent income behavior

faraway so close coupled climate and economic dynamics in an agent based integrated assessment model abstract in this work we develop an agent based model that offers an alternative to standard computable general equilibrium integrated assessment models iams the dystopian schumpeter meeting keynes dsk model is composed of heterogeneous firms belonging to capital good consumption good and energy sectors production and energy generation lead to greenhouse gas emissions which affect temperature dynamics climate damages are modelled at the individual level as stochastic shocks hitting workers labour productivity energy efficiency capital stock and inventories of firms in that aggregate damages emerge from the aggregation of losses suffered by heterogeneous interacting and boundedly rational agents the model is run focusing on a business as usual carbon intensive scenario consistent with a representative concentration pathway 8 5 we find that the dsk model is able to account for a wide ensemble of micro and macro empirical regularities concerning both economic and climate dynamics simulation experiments show a substantial lack of isomorphism between the effects of micro and macro level shocks as it is typical in complex system models in particular different types of shocks have heterogeneous impact on output growth unemployment rate and the likelihood of economic crises pointing to the importance of the different economic channel affected by the shock overall we report much larger climate damages than those projected by standard iams under comparable scenarios suggesting possible shifts in the growth dynamics from a self sustained pattern to stagnation and high volatility and the need of urgent policy interventions

targeting the real exchange rate theory and evidence abstract this paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of policies aimed at setting a more depreciated level of the real exchange rate an intertemporal optimizing model suggests that in the absence of changes in fiscal policy a more depreciated level of the real exchange rate can only be attained temporarily this can be achieved by means of higher inflation and or higher real interest rates depending on the degree of capital mobility evidence for brazil chile and colombia supports the model s prediction that undervalued real exchange rates are associated with higher inflation

good enough for government work macroeconomics since the crisis this paper argues that when the financial crisis came policy makers relied on some version of the hicksian sticky price is lm as their default model these models were good enough for government work while there have been many incremental changes suggested to the dsge model there has been no single big new idea because the even simpler is lm type models were what worked well in particular the policy responses based on is lm were appropriate specifically these models generated the insights that large budget deficits would not drive up interest rates and while the economy remained at the zero lower bound that very large increases in monetary base wouldn t be inflationary and that the multiplier on government spending was greater than 1 the one big exception to this satisfactory understanding was in price behaviour a large output gap was expected to lead to a large fall in inflation but did not if new research is necessary it is on pricing behaviour while there was a failure to forecast the crisis it did not come down to a lack of understanding of possible mechanisms or of a lack of data but rather through a lack of attention to the right data

causes and consequences of hysteresis aggregate demand productivity and employment in this work we develop an agent based model where hysteresis in major macroeconomic variables e g gross domestic product productivity unemployment emerges out of the decentralized interactions of heterogeneous firms and workers building upon the schumpeter meeting keynes family of models cf in particular dosi et al 2016b 2017c we specify an endogenous process of accumulation of workers skills and a state dependent process of firms entry indeed hysteresis is ubiquitous however this is not due to market imperfections but rather to the very functioning of decentralized economies characterized by coordination externalities and dynamic increasing returns so contrary to the insider outsider hypothesis blanchard and summers 1986 the model does not support the findings that rigid industrial relations may foster hysteretic behavior in aggregate unemployment on the contrary this contribution provides evidence that during severe downturns and thus declining aggregate demand phenomena like decreasing investment and innovation rates skills deterioration and declining entry dynamics are better candidates to explain long run unemployment spells and reduced output growth in that more rigid labor markets may well dampen hysteretic dynamics by sustaining aggregate demand thus making the economy more resilient

identification issues in forward looking models estimated by gmm with an application to the phillips curve limited information methods are commonly used to estimate forward looking models with rational expectations such as the new keynesian phillips curve of gal and gertler 1999 in this paper we address issues of identiflcation that have been overlooked due to the incompleteness of the single equation formulation we show that problems of weak instruments may arise depending on the properties of the exogenous variables and that they are empirically relevant we also uncover a link between identiflcation and dynamic mis speciflcation and examine the lack of power of hansen s 1982 j test to detect invalid over identifying restrictions with regards to the new phillips curve we flnd that problems of identiflcation cannot be ruled out and they deserve further attention

what drives markups evolutionary pricing in an agent based stock flow consistent macroeconomic model this paper studies coordination between firms in a multi sectoral macroeconomic model with endogenous business cycles firms are both in competition and interdependent and set their prices with a markup over unit costs markups are heterogeneous and evolve under market pressure we observe a systematic coordination within firms in each sector and between each sector the resulting pattern of relative prices are consistent with the labor theory of value those emerging features are robust to technology shocks

identification issues in limited information bayesian analysis of structural macroeconomic models the likelihood of the parameters in structural macroeconomic models typically has non identification regions over which it is constant when sufficiently diffuse priors are used the posterior piles up in such non identification regions use of informative priors can lead to the opposite so both can generate spurious inference we propose priors posteriors on the structural parameters that are implied by priors posteriors on the parameters of an embedding reduced form model an example of such a prior is the jeffreys prior we use it to conduct bayesian limited information inference on the new keynesian phillips curve with a var reduced form for us data

trend inflation indexation and inflation persistence in the new keynesian phillips curve purely forward looking versions of the new keynesian phillips curve nkpc generate too little inflation persistence some authors add ad hoc backward looking terms to address this shortcoming we hypothesize that inflation per sistence results mainly from variation in the long run trend component of inflation which we attribute to shifts in monetary policy we derive a version of the nkpc that incorporates a time varying inflation trend and examine whether it explains the dynamics of inflation when drift in trend inflation is taken into account a purely forward looking version of the model fits the data well and there is no need for backward looking components jel e12 e31 e52 in this paper we consider the extent to which guillermo calvo s 1983 model of nominal price rigidities can explain inflation dynamics without relying on arbitrary backward looking terms in its baseline formulation the calvo model leads to a purely forward looking new keynesian

priors from general equilibrium models for vars abstract this paper uses a simple new keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model as a prior for a vector autoregression shows that the resulting model is competitive with standard benchmarks in terms of forecasting and can be used for policy analysis jel classification c11 c32 c53 key words bayesian analysis dsge models forecasting vector autoregressions 1 introduction dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge models are popular nowadays in macroeconomics they are taught in virtually every economics ph d program and represent a predominant share of publications in the field yet when it comes to policy making these models are scarcely used at least from a quantitative point of view the main quantitative workhorse for policy making at the federal reserve system is frb us a macro econometric model built in the cowles foundation tradition a style of macroeconomics that is no longer taught in many ph d programs 1 in their decision process fed policy makers rely heavily on forecasting they want to know the expected path of inflation in the next few quarters and by how much a 50 basis point increase in the federal funds rate would affect that path frb us offers answers to these questions answers that many macroeconomists would regard with suspicion given both the lucas 1976 critique and the fact that in general the restrictions imposed by cowles foundation models are at odds with dynamic general equilibrium macroeconomics sims 1980 general equilibrium models on the other hand have a hard time providing alternative answers the fact that these models are perceived to do badly in terms of forecasting as they are scarcely parameterized is perhaps one of the reasons why they are not at the forefront of policy making while progress is being made in the development of dsge models that deliver acceptable forecasts e g smets and wouters 2003 this paper proposes an approach that combines a stylized general equilibrium model with a vector autoregression var to obtain a specification that both forecasts well and is usable for policy analysis specifically the approach involves using prior information coming from a dsge model in the estimation of a vector autoregression loosely speaking this prior can be thought of as the result of the following exercise i simulate time series data from the dsge model ii fit a var to these data in practice we replace the sample moments of the simulated data by population moments computed from the dsge model solution since the dsge model depends on unknown structural parameters we use a hierarchical prior in our analysis by placing a distribution on the dsge model parameters a tightness parameter controls the weight of the dsge model prior relative to the weight of the actual sample markov chain monte carlo methods are used to generate draws from the joint posterior distribution of the var and dsge model parameters the paper shows that the approach makes even a fairly stylized new keynesian dsge model competitive with standard benchmarks in terms of forecasting real output growth inflation and the nominal interest rate the three variables that are of most interest to policy makers 2 up to this point our procedure borrows from the work of dejong ingram and whiteman 1993 and ingram and whiteman 1994 who are the first to use priors from dsge models for vars ingram and whiteman showed that prior information from the bare bones stochastic growth model of king plosser and rebelo 1988 is helpful in forecasting real economic activity such as output consumption investment and hours worked in addition to documenting the forecasting performance of a trivariate var with a prior derived from a monetary dsge model this paper makes two contributions that significantly extend the earlier work first we show formally how posterior inference for the var parameters can be translated into posterior inference for dsge model parameters

posterior predictive evidence on us inflation using extended new keynesian phillips curve models with non filtered data changing time series properties of us inflation and economic activity measured as marginal costs are modeled within a set of extended new keynesian phillips curve nkpc models it is shown that mechanical removal or modeling of simple low frequency movements in the data may yield poor predictive results which depend on the model specification used basic nkpc models are extended to include structural time series models that describe typical time varying patterns in levels and volatilities forward and backward looking expectation components for inflation are incorporated and their relative importance is evaluated survey data on expected inflation are introduced to strengthen the information in the likelihood use is made of simulation based bayesian techniques for the empirical analysis no credible evidence is found on endogeneity and long run stability between inflation and marginal costs backward looking inflation appears stronger than forward looking inflation levels and volatilities of inflation are estimated more precisely using rich nkpc models the extended nkpc structures compare favorably with existing basic bayesian vector autoregressive and stochastic volatility models in terms of fit and prediction tails of the complete predictive distributions indicate an increase in the probability of deflation in recent years

on the fit of new keynesian models this article provides new tools for the evaluation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge models and applies them to a large scale new keynesian model we approximate the dsge model by a vector autoregression and then systematically relax the implied cross equation restrictions and document how the model fit changes we also compare the dsge model s impulse responses to structural shocks with those obtained after relaxing its restrictions we find that the degree of misspecification in this large scale dsge model is no longer so large as to prevent its use in day to day policy analysis yet is not small enough to be ignored

var based estimation of euler equations with an application to new keynesian pricing abstract var based estimation of euler equations exploits cross equation restrictions that the theory imposes on a vector autoregressive var process for market expectations this paper shows that sargent s 1979 a note on maximum likelihood estimation of the rational expectations model of the term structure journal of monetary economics 5 133 143 original approach of imposing these restrictions on the endogenous variable of the euler equation i e computing the rational expectations solution implies multiple solutions and is therefore impracticable the paper shows that this identification problem can be circumvented by reverse engineering the cross equation restrictions on the forcing variable of the euler equation the proposed reverse engineering approach contrasts with the conventional approach in the literature that avoids the identification problem by constraining the system formed by the euler equation and the var process to yield a unique stable rational expectations equilibrium this uniqueness condition makes little economic sense because the var process is just a reduced form approximation of true market expectations and a simulation experiment shows that imposing uniqueness can lead to severe misspecification bias the severity of this misspecification bias is illustrated in practice with an application to gali and gertler s 1999 inflation dynamics a structural econometric analysis journal of monetary economics 44 195 222 hybrid new keynesian phillips curve

toward a new microfounded macroeconomics in the wake of the crisis the great recession that followed the financial crisis of 2007 is not only the largest economic crisis after the great depression of the 1930s it also signals a crisis of economics as a discipline this is not only the consequence of the inadequacy of mainstream macroeconomics and specifically the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge workhorse model to forecast such a huge event or at least to detect the worrying tendencies towards it even more relevant is the choice to explicitly avoid the modeling of large crises that for someone is a motivation for not attacking pre crisis dsge models focused on the analysis of small deviations from the steady state so denying the intrinsic nature of capitalism a system that necessarily proceeds through cycles and extended crises the replies of the dsge approach to critics have led to extensions regarding for instance the role of financial frictions heterogeneous agents and bounded rationality though typically in the form of quasi rational expectations the alternative paradigm of agent based ab macroeconomics can take into account all these elements at once within an evolutionary modeling framework based on heterogeneity and interaction so capable to endogenously reproduce complex dynamics from small fluctuations to large crises due to innovation and industrial dynamics rising inequality and financial instability and so on the integration between ab macroeconomics and the post keynesian stock flow consistent approach represents a promising way for the future development of this research field

schumpeter meeting keynes a policy friendly model of endogenous growth and business cycles this paper studies an agent based model that bridges keynesian theories of demandgeneration and schumpeterian theories of technology fueled economic growth we employ the model to investigate the properties of macroeconomic dynamics and the impact of public polices on supply demand and the fundamentals of the economy we find profound complementarities between factors influencing aggregate demand and drivers of technological change that affect both short run fluctuations and longterm growth patterns from a normative point of view simulations show a corresponding complementarity between keynesian and schumpeterian policies in sustaining long run growth paths characterized by milder fluctuations and relatively lower unemployment levels the matching or mismatching between innovative exploration of new technologies and the conditions of demand generation appear to suggest the presence of two distinct regimes of growth or absence thereof characterized by different short run fluctuations and unemployment levels

agent based stock flow consistent macroeconomics towards a benchmark model abstract the paper moves from a discussion of the challenges posed by the crisis to standard macroeconomics and the solutions adopted within the dsge community although several recent improvements have enhanced the realism of standard models we argue that major drawbacks still undermine their reliability in particular dsge models still fail to recognize the complex adaptive nature of economic systems and the implications of money endogeneity the paper argues that a coherent and exhaustive representation of the inter linkages between the real and financial sides of the economy should be a pivotal feature of every macroeconomic model and proposes a macroeconomic framework based on the combination of the agent based and stock flow consistent approaches the papers aims at contributing to the nascent ab sfc literature under two fundamental respects first we develop a fully decentralized ab sfc model with several innovative features and we thoroughly validate it in order to check whether the model is a good candidate for policy analysis applications results suggest that the properties of the model match many empirical regularities ranking among the best performers in the related literature and that these properties are robust across different parameterizations second the paper has also a methodological purpose in that we try to provide a set or rules and tools to build calibrate validate and display ab sfc models

stock flow consistent macroeconomic models a survey the stock flow consistent sfc modelling approach grounded in the pioneering work of wynne godley and james tobin in the 1970s has been adopted by a growing number of researchers in macroeconomics especially after the publication of monetary economics by godley and lavoie which provided a general framework for the analysis of whole economic systems and the recognition that macroeconomic models integrating real markets with flow of funds analysis had been particularly successful in predicting the great recession of 2007 2009 we introduce the general features of the sfc approach for a closed economy showing how the core model has been extended to address issues such as financialization and income distribution we next discuss the implications of the approach for models of open economies and compare the methodologies adopted in developing sfc empirical models for whole countries we review the contributions where the sfc approach is being adopted as the macroeconomic closure of microeconomic agent based models and how the sfc approach is at the core of new research in ecological macroeconomics finally we discuss the appropriateness of the name sfc for the class of models we survey

when complexity meets finance a contribution to the study of the macroeconomic effects of complex financial systems in the last decade complexity economics has emerged as a powerful approach to the understanding of the most relevant factors influencing economic development the concept of economic complexity has been applied to the study of different economic issues such as economic growth technological change and inequality with this work we aim at extending the application of this concept to the study of the financial side of the economy and in particular of the macroeconomic effects of rising financial complexity in this paper we present an agent based model integrating an increasingly complex financial sector with a real side of the economy populated among other sectors by heterogeneous households we test the systemic impact that the increasing complexity of both the financial system and the financial products it manufactures bear on economic growth macroeconomic stability and inequality we find mixed results with respect to the positive economic implications the existing literature ascribes to products complexity and deepening production capabilities despite higher financial complexity may lead to faster growth our model suggests that this comes at the cost of heightened financial fragility a more crisis prone economic system and increasing levels of income and wealth inequality according to these findings and consistently with pioneering insights from minsky we claim that rising complexity does not always entail positive consequences for the well being of the economy this is particularly true when it comes to financial innovations and financial complexity

backcasting u s oil demand over a turbulent decade abstract this paper compares 10 year backcast projections of u s petroleum consumption for the 2000 2009 period based upon a range of functional forms although a univariate specification based upon only lagged consumption performed better than most approaches it provides little value to the policymaker who wants to understand the factors that influence oil consumption and by how much one structural approach performed considerably better than all other approaches including the univariate model this specification is the autoregressive distributed lag adl model that allowed oil demand to respond differently asymmetrically to price increases and decreases certain forms of this equation however do well while others perform poorly evaluations of backcast projections over different periods and updated frequently can be important byproducts of energy modeling

emergent dynamics of a macroeconomic agent based model with capital and credit in this paper we present and discuss a macroeconomic agent based model with capital and credit cc mabm which builds upon the framework put forward by delli gatti et al 2011 the novelty of this model with respect to the previous framework consists in the introduction of a stylized supply chain where upstream firms i e producers of capital goods k firms supply a durable and sticky input capital to the downstream firms who produce consumption goods c firms to be sold to households both c firms and k firms resort to bank loans to satisfy their financing needs there are two way feedbacks between firms and markets which yield interesting emerging properties at the macro level we show that the interaction of upstream and downstream firms and the evolution of their financial conditions in a nutshell capital and credit are essential ingredients of a crisis i e a sizable slump followed by a long recovery

an evaluation of errors in us energy forecasts 1982 2003 planners policy makers and the private sector rely on energy forecasts to help make policy and investment decisions in the us the federal department of energy through the energy information administration and its predecessors has conducted national forecasts of energy production and consumption for decades this paper explores us energy forecasts in order to uncover potential systemic errors in us forecasting models we apply an error decomposition technique to forecasts within each major energy sector commercial industrial residential and transportation made during the period 1982 to 2003 we find that low errors for total energy consumption are concealing much larger sectoral errors that cancel each other out when aggregated for example 5 year forecasts made between 1982 and 1998 demonstrate a mean percentage error for total energy consumption of 0 1 yet this hides the fact that the industrial sector was overestimated by an average of 5 9 and the transportation sector was underestimated by an average of 4 5 we also find no evidence that forecasts within each sector have improved over the two decades studied here