Burkhard Heer – författare

Today, the most pressing challenges for public economics are of macroeconomic nature: pensions, debt, income distribution, and fiscal sustainability. All these problems are compounded by the phenomenon of demographic transition and aging. This graduate textbook addresses these issues with the help of state-of-the-art macroeconomic tools that are based on a sound microfoundation and rooted in empirical evidence. Different from the standard partial-equilibrium analysis in traditional textbooks on public economics, the concept of general equilibrium helps to account for compensating or amplifying side-effects of economic policy.

GAUSS and MATLAB computer code as well as teaching material (slides) are available as downloads from the author''s homepage.

Contemporary macroeconomics is built upon microeconomic principles, with its most recent advance featuring dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. The textbook by Heer and Maußner acquaints readers with the essential computational techniques required to tackle these models and employ them for quantitative analysis. This third edition maintains the structure of the second, dividing the content into three separate parts dedicated to representative agent models, heterogeneous agent models, and numerical methods. At the same time, every chapter has been revised and two entirely new chapters have been added.

The updated content reflects the latest advances in both numerical methods and their applications in macroeconomics, spanning areas like business-cycle analysis, economic growth theory, distributional economics, monetary and fiscal policy. The two new chapters delve into advanced techniques, including higher-order perturbation, weighted residual methods, and solutions to high-dimensional nonlinear problems. In addition, the authors present further insights from macroeconomic theory, complemented by practical applications like the Smolyak algorithm, Gorman aggregation, rare disaster models and dynamic Laffer curves. Lastly, the new edition places special emphasis on practical implementation across various programming languages; accordingly, its accompanying web page offers examples of computer code for languages such as MATLAB®, GAUSS, Fortran, Julia and Python.

Modern business cycle theory and growth theory uses stochastic dynamic general equilibrium models. Many mathematical tools are needed to solve these models. The book presents various methods for computing the dynamics of general equilibrium models. In part I, the representative-agent stochastic growth model is solved with the help of value function iteration, linear and linear quadratic approximation methods, parameterised expectations and projection methods. In order to apply these methods, fundamentals from numerical analysis are reviewed in detail. Part II discusses methods for solving heterogeneous-agent economies. In such economies, the distribution of the individual state variables is endogenous. This part of the book also serves as an introduction to the modern theory of distribution economics. Applications include the dynamics of the income distribution over the business cycle or the overlapping-generations model. Through an accompanying home page to this book, computer codes to all applications can be downloaded.

Modern business cycle theory and growth theory uses stochastic dynamic general equilibrium models. In order to solve these models, economists need to use many mathematical tools. This book presents various methods in order to compute the dynamics of general equilibrium models. In part I, the representative-agent stochastic growth model is solved with the help of value function iteration, linear and linear quadratic approximation methods, parameterised expectations and projection methods. In order to apply these methods, fundamentals from numerical analysis are reviewed in detail. In particular, the book discusses issues that are often neglected in existing work on computational methods, e.g. how to find a good initial value.

In part II, the authors discuss methods in order to solve heterogeneous-agent economies. In such economies, the distribution of the individual state variables is endogenous. This part of the book also serves as an introduction to the modern theory of distribution economics. Applications include the dynamics of the income distribution over the business cycle or the overlapping-generations model.

In an accompanying home page to this book, computer codes to all applications can be downloaded.