The aim of this paper is to empirically validate the agent-based macroeconomic model of Gaffeo et al. [2008]. We show that the microsimulated version of the model is able to replicate actual data with a satisfactory degree of precision. From a theoretical point of view, our validation approach...

In this paper we analyze the size distribution of Italian firms by age. In other words, we want to establish whether the way that the size of firms is distributed varies as firms become old. As a proxy of size we use capital. In [L.M.B. Cabral, J. Mata, On the evolution of the firm size...

We discuss a special Pólya lattice model to study cascading failures of firms in a simple industrial economy. In particular, every firm is represented by a Pólya-like urn, whose reinforcement is function of time, of the neighboring urns and their compositions, and of a random variable...

We examine the Boulogne wholesale fish market, analysing the structure of the trading network between sellers and buyers. Differently from other works in the literature, our analysis indicates a significant amount of ‘bilateral loyalty’ seller--buyer. Loyalty is from buyers to a few sellers...

Recent economic literature indicates that imperfections in the credit market can amplify business fluctuations causing financial fragility. Starting from the framework of Greenwald and Stiglitz (1993) and Delli Gatti et al. (2005), we make a more careful model of the banking sector in Italy and...

Block bootstrap has been introduced in the literature for resampling dependent data, i.e. stationary processes. One of the main assumptions in block bootstrapping is that the blocks of observations are exchangeable, i.e. their joint distribution is immune to permutations. In this paper we...