An accommodating monetary policy followed by a sudden increase of the short term interest rate often leads to a bubble burst and to an economic slowdown. Two examples are the Great Depression of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2008. Through the implementation of an Agent Based Model with a...

Assessing systemic risk and defining macro-prudential policies aiming at reducing economic system vulnerability have been at the center of the economic debate of the last years. Credit networks play a crucial role in diffusing and amplifying local shocks, following the network-based financial...

We developed a multi country agent based simulation model with endogenous incremental technological change. Macroeconomic dynamics derive from simple behavioral and interacting rules defining the actions of adaptive firms, banks and households (Delli Gatti et al., 2008; Riccetti et al., 2014; Caiani et...

In this paper we introduce a calibration procedure for validating of agent based models. Starting from the well-known financial model of Brock and Hommes 1998, we show how an appropriate calibration enables the model to describe price time series. We formulate the calibration problem as a...

This paper investigates experimentally whether risk attitudes are stable across social contexts. In particular, it focuses on situations where some resource (for instance, a position, decision power, a bonus) has to be allocated between two parties: the decision maker can either opt for sharing...

We take a first pass at quantifying the magnitudes of debt relief achieved through default and restructuring in two distinct samples: 1979-2010, focusing on credit events in emerging markets, and 1920-1939, documenting the official debt hangover in advanced economies that was created by World...

We incorporate trade in tasks à la Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) into a small open economy version of the theory of firm organization of Marin and Verdier (2012) to examine how offshoring affects the way firms organize. We show that the offshoring of production tasks leads firms to...

We show that the countries of the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy trade significantly more with one another in the aftermath of the collapse of the Iron Curtain than predicted by a standard gravity model. This trade surplus declines linearly and monotonically over time. We argue that these...

In this paper, I evaluate the impact of innovative activity of financial agents on their fragility in a competitive framework. There exist a vast array of concerns about the interconnection of financial innovations, financial distress of firms and financial crises provided by theoretical...

This paper investigates the economic returns to language skills and bilingualism. The analysis is staged in Kazakhstan, a multi-ethnic country with complex ethnic settlement patterns that has switched its official state language from Russian to Kazakh. Using two newly assembled data sets, we...