In this paper we present the basics of a research program aimed at providing microfoundations to macroeconomic theory on the basis of computational agentbased adaptive descriptions of individual behavior. To exemplify our proposal, a simple prototype model of decentralized multi-market...

The firmly established evidence of right-skewness of the firms’ size distribution is generally modelled recurring to some variant of the Gibrat’s Law of Proportional Effects. In spite of its empirical success, this approach has been harshly criticized on a theoretical ground due to its lack...

Can consolidation policy be made consistent with macro-prudential supervision? In this study, we seek to provide new insights on this key-question using a network approach. We study how the resilience of a banking network evolves as we shock an initially homogenous competitive market with a...

This paper employs panel techniques to empirically examine the link between the competitiveness of the banking sector and real economic growth, using data from a sample of OECD economies during 1997-2010. We employ a dynamic GMM model to find that an increase in the efficiency of banks driven by...

In this paper we make use of firm-level data for a sample of European countries to prove the existence of a positive linear relationship between the mean and the variance of firms’ size, an empirical regularity known in mathematical biology as the Taylor power law. A computerized experiment is...

We studied the distribution dynamics of the demand for books in Italy. We found that for each of the three broad sub-markets into which the book publishing industry can be classified - Italian novels, foreign novels and non-fiction - sales over a three-year sample can be adequately fitted by a...

The recent revision (March 2005) of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) has confirmed the 3% deficit/GDP ratio as the pillar of the excessive deficits procedure envisaged by the Maastricht Treaty for member countries of the EMU. Since the deficit/GDP ceiling is still in place, research on its...

Macroeconomic models are typically solved through the imposition of a top-down general equilibrium solution constraining agents' rational be- havior. This is customarily obtained by recurring, explicitly or not, to the Walrasian auctioneer (WA) artifice. In this paper we aim at contributing to...

This paper develops a network model of a stylized banking system in which banks are connected to one another through interbank claims, which allows us to study the diffusion of default avalanches triggered by an exogenous shock under a number of different assumptions on the degree of...