After 40 years of stability, the homeownership rate -- a target for housing policy -- has steadily increased since 1995. We attempt to understand this increase using a quantitative model to evaluate various suggested explanations. We find that the increase can be explained by mortgage-market...

Over the past decade there has been remarkable progress in developing empirical micro-founded macroeconomic models for monetary policy analysis that feature coherence both to economic theory and to the data. In this paper, we estimate using Bayesian methods a second-generation micro founded...

In this paper we study optimal fiscal and monetary rules in a medium-scale estimated model of the U.S. business cycle. The model features several real and nominal rigidities that have been identfied in the recent literature as salient in explaining observed aggregate fluctuations. The government...

In April 2003 the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proposed the Wholesale Power Market Platform (WPMP) for common adoption by all U.S. wholesale power markets. The WPMP is a complicated market design envisioning day-ahead, real-time, and ancillary service markets maintained and operated...

Computational laboratories (CLs) are computational frameworks that facilitate the study of complex system behaviors by means of controlled and replicable experiments. CLs permit students to engage in open-ended creative research, to explore interesting questions of their own devising for which...

Smith and Sørenson (2002) depart from Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer and Welsh’s (1999) herding framework in three ways; non-discrete signals, noise and multiple rational agent types. They refer to the standard model of a single type with no noise as a “herding†model, and differentiate...

We introduce a general framework to value pilot project investments under the presence of both, market and technical uncertainty. The model generalizes different settings introduced previously in the literature. By distinguishing between the pilot and the commercial stages of the project we are...

In recent years, the learnability of rational expectations equilibria (REE) and determinacy of economic structures have rightfully joined the usual performance criteria among the sought after goals of policy design. And while some contributions to the literature (for example Bullard and Mitra...

This paper presents an attempt to solve and estimate a structural dynamic non-linear rational expectation model. The main contribution of this paper is to explore the Smolyak operator for numerical approximation and integration in a generic model class which do not suffer exponentially but only...

We study a dynamic version of Meltzer and Richard's median-voter model where agents differ in initial wealth. Taxes are proportional to total income, and they are redistributed as equal lump-sum transfers. Voting takes place every period and each consumer votes for the tax rate that maximizes...