Can competition work among privately issued fiat currencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum? Only sometimes. To show this, we build a model of competition among privately issued fiat currencies. We modify the current workhorse of monetary economics, the Lagos-Wright environment, by including...

Can competition among privately issued fiat currencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum work? Only sometimes. To show this, we build a model of competition among privately issued fiat currencies. We modify the current workhorse of monetary economics, the Lagos-Wright environment, by including...

This guide provides a practical introduction to parallel computing in economics. After a brief introduction to the basic ideas of parallelization, we show how to parallelize a prototypical application in economics using, on CPUs, Julia, Matlab, R, Python, C++-OpenMP, Rcpp–OpenMP, and C++-MPI,...

We propose a new method for solving high-dimensional dynamic programming problems and recursive competitive equilibria with a large (but finite) number of heterogeneous agents using deep learning. The „curse of dimensionality“ is avoided due to four complementary techniques: (1) exploiting...

This paper combines data on GDP, unemployment, and Google's COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports with data on deaths from COVID-19 to study the macroeconomic outcomes of the pandemic. We present results from an international perspective using data at the country level as well as results for...

Job security provisions are commonly invoked to explain the high and persistent European unemployment rates. This belief has led several countries to reform their labor markets and liberalize the use of fixed-term contracts. Despite how common such contracts have become after deregulation, there...

We argue that social and political risk causes significant aggregate fluctuations by changing workers’ bargaining power. Using a Bayesian proxy-VAR estimated with U.S. data, we show how distribution shocks trigger output and unemployment movements. To quantify the aggregate importance of these...

We present a general framework for Bayesian estimation and causality assessment in epidemiological models. The key to our approach is the use of sequential Monte Carlo methods to evaluate the likelihood of a generic epidemiological model. Once we have the likelihood, we specify priors and rely...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms that face search complementarities in the formation of vendor contracts. Search complementarities amplify small differences in productivity among firms. Market concentration fosters monopsony power in the labor...

We show how to use field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and their associated high-level synthesis (HLS) compilers to solve heterogeneous agent models with incomplete markets and aggregate uncertainty (Krusell and Smith, 1998). We document that the acceleration delivered by one single FPGA is...