Macroeconomics from the Bottom-up (New Economic Windows) - Hardcover

Delli Gatti, Domenico; Desiderio, Saul; Gaffeo, Edoardo; Cirillo, Pasquale; Gallegati, Mauro

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 8847019702 ISBN 13: 9788847019706

Publisher: Springer, 2011

Synopsis

This book arose from our conviction that the NNS-DSGE approach to the analysis of aggregate market outcomes is fundamentally flawed. The practice of overcoming the SMD result by recurring to a fictitious RA leads to insurmountable methodological problems and lies at the root of DSGE models' failure to satisfactorily explain real world features, like exchange rate and banking crises, bubbles and herding in financial markets, swings in the sentiment of consumers and entrepreneurs, asymmetries and persistence in aggregate variables, and so on. At odds with this view, our critique rests on the premise that any modern macroeconomy should be modeled instead as a complex system of heterogeneous interacting individuals, acting adaptively and autonomously according to simple and empirically validated rules of thumb. We call our proposed approach Bottom-up Adaptive Macroeconomics (BAM). The reason why we claim that the contents of this book can be inscribed in the realm of macroeconomics is threefold: We are looking for a framework that helps us to think coherently about the interrelationships among two or more markets. In what follows, in particular, three markets will be considered: the markets for goods, labor and loanable funds. In this respect, real time matters: what happens in one market depends on what has happened, on what is happening, or on what will happen in other markets. This implies that intertemporal coordination issues cannot be ignored. Eventually, it's all about prices and quantities. However, we are mostly interested in aggregate prices and quantities, that is indexes built from the dispersed outcomes of the decentralized transactions of a large population of heterogeneous individuals. Each individual acts purposefully, but she knows anything about the levels of prices and quantities which clear markets in the aggregate. In the hope of being allowed to purport scientific claims, BAM relies on the assumption that individual purposeful behaviours aggregate

About this title

Review:

From the reviews:

“Macroeconomics from the Bottom-up proves that agent-based macroeconomics is finally maturing as a field of research. ... Macroeconomics from the Bottom-up can persuade many students that agent-based modeling is one of the best options that economists have for understanding what is currently happening in the real world, i.e. for understanding financial crisis.” (Charlotte Bruun, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, Vol. 14 (4), 2011)

From the Back Cover:

The recent economic events driven by the big financial crisis of 2007-08 has cogently put to the fore the limits and drawbacks of the ruling research paradigm in macroeconomics. This volume goes to the root of the problem by offering a workable alternative to the renowned issue of the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic theory. Bringing together techniques from agent-based computational economics and statistical validation, the authors set the stage for a paradigmatic shift, elaborate on it with practical examples and provide an agenda for future research.   

About this edition

• Publisher: Springer
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 8847019702
• ISBN 13: 9788847019706
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 136