In this work we study the granular origins of business cycles and their possible underlying drivers. As shown by Gabaix (2011), the skewed nature of firm size distributions implies that idiosyncratic (and independent) firm-level shocks may account for a significant portion of aggregate...

Validation has been an important issue in using the ABM approach. It has been pointed out that deriving the necessary conditions for reproducing specific macro behavior is difficult due to the functional complexity of the models. However, based on the authors' experience in ABM, we believe it is...

This paper explores how different credit market and banking regulations affect business fluctuations. Capital adequacy and reserve requirements are analysed for their effect on the risk of severe downturns. We develop an agent-based macroeconomic model in which financial contagion is transmitted...

We conduct a Monte Carlo experiment using an ad-hoc New Keynesian model and a tractable agent-based model to generate artificial credit cycle episodes. We show that fluctuations in the implicit measures of the natural rate of interest obtained using a conventional trivariate Kalman filter on...

This paper is aimed at investigating the effects of government intervention through unemployment benefits on macroeconomic dynamics in an agent based decentralized matching framework. The major result is that the presence of such a public intervention in the economy stabilizes the aggregate...

It has become commonplace to raise the analogy between the recent experience of the dynamics of income distribution and growth, and that of the era before the Great Depression. However, no study of the demand regime has been done for the early twentieth century period; this study attempts to fill...

We develop an efficient and easy-to-use computational method for solving a wide class of general equilibrium heterogeneous agent models with aggregate shocks, together with an open source suite of codes that implement our algorithms in an easy-to-use toolbox. Our method extends standard...