Local (perturbation) methods compute solutions in one point and tend to deliver far lower accuracy levels than global solution methods. We develop a hybrid method that solves for some policy functions locally (using a perturbation method) and that solves for the other policy functions globally...

This paper presents a two-sector growth model of international trade that can account for the key features of the postwar world development experience. Two sectors represent the traditional primitive production and the modern sophisticated production. Due to increasing returns in the modern...

This paper presents a two-sector growth model of international trade that can account for the key features of the postwar world development experience. Two sectors represent traditional primitive production and modern sophisticated production. Due to increasing returns in the modern sector, the...

We introduce a computational technique- precomputation of integrals - that makes it possible to construct conditional expectation functions in dynamic stochastic models in the initial stage of a solution procedure. This technique is very general: it works for a broad class of approximating...

How wrong could policymakers be when using linearized solutions to their macroeconomic models instead of nonlinear global solutions? This question became of much practical interest during the Great Recession and the recent zero lower bound crisis. We assess the importance of nonlinearities in a...

We consider a class of infinite-horizon dynamic Markov economic models in which the parameters of utility function, production function, and transition equations change over time. In such models, the optimal value and decision functions are time-inhomogeneous: they depend not only on state but...

We assess gains from parallel computation on Backlight supercomputer. We find that information transfers are expensive. To make parallel computation efficient, a task per core must be sufficiently large, ranging from few seconds to one minute depending on the number of cores employed. For small...

We propose a novel methodology for evaluating the accuracy of numerical solutions to dynamic economic models. Specifically, we construct a lower bound on the size of approximation errors. A small lower bound on errors is a necessary condition for accuracy: If a lower error bound is unacceptably...

We develop an envelope condition method (ECM) for dynamic programming problems -- a tractable alternative to expensive conventional value function iteration. ECM has two novel features: First, to reduce the cost, ECM replaces expensive backward iteration on Bellman equation with relatively cheap...

We study a class of infinite-horizon nonlinear dynamic economic models in which preferences, technology and laws of motion for exogenous variables can change over time either deterministically or stochastically, according to a Markov process with time-varying transition probabilities, or both....