The Investment Acceleration Principle Revisited by Means of a Neural Net

The investment acceleration principle is a heuristic for modeling investment time series out of consumption time series. The model presented herein develops a disaggregated accelerator equation whose coefficients are the weights of a Kohonen neural net that represents firms' decision-making. According to this model, investments take place when managers recognize emerging technological patterns. Furthermore, a technique borrowed from the theory of self-organizing systems is used in order to disentangle innovation-driven investments from plant- replication investments.