We provide a Matlab quadratic optimization tool based on Markowitz's citical line algorithm that significantly outperforms standard software packages and a recently developed operations research algorithm. As an illustration: For a 2000 asset universe our method needs less than a second to...

This paper proposes a moment-matching method for approximating vector autoregressions by finite-state Markov chains. The Markov chain is constructed by targeting the conditional moments of the underlying continuous process. The proposed method is more robust to the number of discrete values and...

This paper proposes a moment-matching method for approximating vector autoregressions by finite-state Markov chains. The Markov chain is constructed by targeting the conditional moments of the underlying continuous process. The proposed method is more robust to the number of discrete values and...

This paper proposes a moment-matching method for approximating vector autoregressions by finite-state Markov chains. The Markov chain is constructed by targeting the conditional moments of the underlying continuous process. The proposed method is more robust to the number of discrete values and...

The Monte Carlo method is applied to various cases of financial option pricing. Its performance is satisfactory in terms of accuracy when it is compared to other numerical methods. The precision of the estimates provided by Crude Monte Carlo can be improved by implementing variance reduction...

I investigate whether the popular Krusell and Smith algorithm used to solve heterogeneousagent economies with aggregate uncertainty and incomplete markets is likely to be subject to multiple self-fulfilling equilibria. In a benchmark economy, the parameters representing the equilibrium aggregate...

Approximating stochastic processes by finite-state Markov chains is useful for reducing computational complexity when solving dynamic economic models. We provide a new method for accurately discretizing general Markov processes by matching low order moments of the conditional distributions using...

Non-stationary income processes are standard in quantitative life-cycle models, prompted by the observation that within-cohort income inequality increases with age. This paper generalizes Tauchen (1986) and Rouwenhorst's (1995) discretization methods to non-stationary AR(1) processes. We...

The computational time required to solve and estimate dynamic economic models is one of the main constraints in empirical research. The Endogenous Grid Method (EGM) proposed by Carroll (2006) is known to offer impressive speed gains over more traditional stochastic dynamic programming methods,...

The "histogram method" (Young, 2010), while the standard approach for analyzing distributional dynamics in heterogeneous agent models, is linear in optimal policies. We introduce a novel method that captures nonlinearities of distributional dynamics. This method solves the distributional...