Mauro Gallegati - Böcker

Introduction to Agent-Based Economics describes the principal elements of agent-based computational economics (ACE). It illustrates ACE's theoretical foundations, which are rooted in the application of the concept of complexity to the social sciences, and it depicts its growth and development from a non-linear out-of-equilibrium approach to a state-of-the-art agent-based macroeconomics. The book helps readers gain a better understanding of the limits and perspectives of the ACE models and their capacity to reproduce economic phenomena and empirical patterns.

Reviews the literature of agent-based computational economics Analyzes approaches to agents' expectations Covers one of the few large macroeconomic agent-based models, the Modellaccio Illustrates both analytical and computational methodologies for producing tractable solutions of macro ACE models Describes diffusion and amplification mechanisms Depicts macroeconomic experiments related to ACE implementations

This Element presents the κ-generalized distribution, a statistical model tailored for the analysis of income distribution. Developed over years of collaborative, multidisciplinary research, it clarifies the statistical properties of the model, assesses its empirical validity and compares its effectiveness with other parametric models. It also presents formulas for calculating inequality indices within the κ-generalized framework, including the widely used Gini coefficient and the relatively lesser-known Zanardi index of Lorenz curve asymmetry. Through empirical illustrations, the Element criticizes the conventional application of the Gini index, pointing out its inadequacy in capturing the full spectrum of inequality characteristics. Instead, it advocates the adoption of the Zanardi index, accentuating its ability to capture the inherent heterogeneity and asymmetry in income distributions.

This Element works as non-technical overview of Agent-Based Modelling (ABM), a methodology which can be applied to economics, as well as fields of natural and social sciences. This Element presents the introductory notions and historical background of ABM, as well as a general overview of the tools and characteristics of this kind of models, with particular focus on more advanced topics like validation and sensitivity analysis. Agent-based simulations are an increasingly popular methodology which fits well with the purpose of studying problems of computational complexity in systems populated by heterogeneous interacting agents.

This Element works as non-technical overview of Agent-Based Modelling (ABM), a methodology which can be applied to economics, as well as fields of natural and social sciences. This Element presents the introductory notions and historical background of ABM, as well as a general overview of the tools and characteristics of this kind of models, with particular focus on more advanced topics like validation and sensitivity analysis. Agent-based simulations are an increasingly popular methodology which fits well with the purpose of studying problems of computational complexity in systems populated by heterogeneous interacting agents.

Neoclassical economics is heavily based on a formalistic method, primarily centred on mathematical deduction. Consequently, mainstream economists became overfocused on describing the states of an economy rather than understanding the processes driving these states. However, many phenomena arise from the intricate interactions among diverse elements, eluding explanation solely through micro-level rules. Such systems, characterised by emergent properties arising from interactions, are defined as complex. This Element delves into the complexity approach, portraying the economy as an evolving system undergoing structural changes over time.

Neoclassical economics is heavily based on a formalistic method, primarily centred on mathematical deduction. Consequently, mainstream economists became overfocused on describing the states of an economy rather than understanding the processes driving these states. However, many phenomena arise from the intricate interactions among diverse elements, eluding explanation solely through micro-level rules. Such systems, characterised by emergent properties arising from interactions, are defined as complex. This Element delves into the complexity approach, portraying the economy as an evolving system undergoing structural changes over time.

Technological change and innovation have long fueled economic growth and employment. Yet, in recent decades, productivity gains have increasingly failed to translate into more jobs and higher wages. Jobless Growth and the New Great Transformation investigates this apparent paradox, by examining the theoretical and empirical evidence about the relationship between innovation and structural change. It combines rigorous and cutting-edge data analysis with EU case studies to reveal how recent technological breakthroughs, far from driving shared prosperity, have slowed growth, widened spatial divides and fueled societal polarization, partly due to excessive confidence in market deregulation. Drawing on data-driven analyses, the book explains why impacts of innovation vary so widely between regions and how history, institutions, and policy-not just market forces-determine who benefits from technological advances and who is left behind.

Technological change and innovation have long fueled economic growth and employment. Yet, in recent decades, productivity gains have increasingly failed to translate into more jobs and higher wages. Jobless Growth and the New Great Transformation investigates this apparent paradox, by examining the theoretical and empirical evidence about the relationship between innovation and structural change. It combines rigorous and cutting-edge data analysis with EU case studies to reveal how recent technological breakthroughs, far from driving shared prosperity, have slowed growth, widened spatial divides and fueled societal polarization, partly due to excessive confidence in market deregulation. Drawing on data-driven analyses, the book explains why impacts of innovation vary so widely between regions and how history, institutions, and policy-not just market forces-determine who benefits from technological advances and who is left behind.

One of the major problems of macroeconomic theory is the way in which the people exchange goods in decentralized market economies. There are major disagreements among macroeconomists regarding tools to influence required outcomes. Since the mainstream efficient market theory fails to provide an internal coherent framework, there is a need for an alternative theory. The book provides an innovative approach for the analysis of agent based models, populated by the heterogeneous and interacting agents in the field of financial fragility. The text is divided in two parts; the first presents analytical developments of stochastic aggregation and macro-dynamics inference methods. The second part introduces macroeconomic models of financial fragility for complex systems populated by heterogeneous and interacting agents. The concepts of financial fragility and macroeconomic dynamics are explained in detail in separate chapters. The statistical physics approach is applied to explain theories of macroeconomic modelling and inference.

In contrast to mainstream economics, complexity theory conceives the economy as a complex system of heterogeneous interacting agents characterised by limited information and bounded rationality. Agent Based Models (ABMs) are the analytical and computational tools developed by the proponents of this emerging methodology. Aimed at students and scholars of contemporary economics, this book includes a comprehensive toolkit for agent-based computational economics, now quickly becoming the new way to study evolving economic systems. Leading scholars in the field explain how ABMs can be applied fruitfully to many real-world economic examples and represent a great advancement over mainstream approaches. The essays discuss the methodological bases of agent-based approaches and demonstrate step-by-step how to build, simulate and analyse ABMs and how to validate their outputs empirically using the data. They also present a wide set of applications of these models to key economic topics, including the business cycle, labour markets, and economic growth.

In contrast to mainstream economics, complexity theory conceives the economy as a complex system of heterogeneous interacting agents characterised by limited information and bounded rationality. Agent Based Models (ABMs) are the analytical and computational tools developed by the proponents of this emerging methodology. Aimed at students and scholars of contemporary economics, this book includes a comprehensive toolkit for agent-based computational economics, now quickly becoming the new way to study evolving economic systems. Leading scholars in the field explain how ABMs can be applied fruitfully to many real-world economic examples and represent a great advancement over mainstream approaches. The essays discuss the methodological bases of agent-based approaches and demonstrate step-by-step how to build, simulate and analyse ABMs and how to validate their outputs empirically using the data. They also present a wide set of applications of these models to key economic topics, including the business cycle, labour markets, and economic growth.

This challenging book extends standard economic theory to take into account the presence of heterogeneity among economic agents. It argues for an approach to economic analysis which regards the economy as an interactive system with heterogeneous agents and not simply a system which treats aggregates as some 'representative' individual.The authors consider that no sector of the economy can be treated as behaving like a single individual and each sector should be modelled as a complex interactive system. They apply this approach to many macro- and micro- analyses including monetary policy and firms, technological innovation and the insider-outsider model. In conclusion the authors find that this approach proves much more fruitful in explaining empirical phenomena than much of the existing theory. The result of this approach to economic theory which encompasses many realistic features, provides a vision of the economy which is not at odds with common sense, but which does not abandon rigorous analysis.This important book will be welcomed by those interested in both macro and micro economic theory.

“This book is flower blossomed by one of the two greatest Italian economists.” Bruce Greenwald, Columbia University “The author’s - the ABM prophet’s - thoughts on economics have been at the forefront of the world.

This book presents a systematic overview of cutting-edge research in the field of parametric modeling of personal income and wealth distribution, which allows one to represent how income/wealth is distributed within a given population. The estimated parameters may be used to gain insights into the causes of the evolution of income/wealth distribution over time, or to interpret the differences between distributions across countries. Moreover, once a given parametric model has been fitted to a data set, one can straightforwardly compute inequality and poverty measures. Finally, estimated parameters may be used in empirical modeling of the impact of macroeconomic conditions on the evolution of personal income/wealth distribution. In reviewing the state of the art in the field, the authors provide a thorough discussion of parametric models belonging to the “κ-generalized” family, a new and fruitful set of statistical models for the size distribution of income and wealth that they have developed over several years of collaborative and multidisciplinary research. This book will be of interest to all who share the belief that problems of income and wealth distribution merit detailed conceptual and methodological attention.

This book offers a practical guide to Agent Based economic modeling, adopting a “learning by doing” approach to help the reader master the fundamental tools needed to create and analyze Agent Based models. After providing them with a basic “toolkit” for Agent Based modeling, it present and discusses didactic models of real financial and economic systems in detail. While stressing the main features and advantages of the bottom-up perspective inherent to this approach, the book also highlights the logic and practical steps that characterize the model building procedure. A detailed description of the underlying codes, developed using R and C, is also provided. In addition, each didactic model is accompanied by exercises and applications designed to promote active learning on the part of the reader. Following the same approach, the book also presents several complementary tools required for the analysis and validation of the models, such as sensitivity experiments, calibration exercises, economic network and statistical distributions analysis.By the end of the book, the reader will have gained a deeper understanding of the Agent Based methodology and be prepared to use the fundamental techniques required to start developing their own economic models.Accordingly, “Economics with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents” will be of particular interest to graduate and postgraduate students, as well as to academic institutions and lecturers interested in including an overview of the AB approach to economic modeling in their courses.

This book presents a systematic overview of cutting-edge research in the field of parametric modeling of personal income and wealth distribution, which allows one to represent how income/wealth is distributed within a given population.

This book offers a practical guide to Agent Based economic modeling, adopting a “learning by doing” approach to help the reader master the fundamental tools needed to create and analyze Agent Based models.

“This book is flower blossomed by one of the two greatest Italian economists.” Bruce Greenwald, Columbia University “The author’s - the ABM prophet’s - thoughts on economics have been at the forefront of the world.

This volume contains a selection of contributions presented at the WEHIA02 (Workshop on Economies with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents), which was held at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Physics of Trieste, Italy, on May 29- 31, under the auspices of Exystence, Complex System network of excellence . WEHIA02 is the 7th edition of a workshop, which was held for the first time at the University of Ancona, Italy , on 1996 (1), as a one-week series of seminars for the Italian PhD program . Ancona hosted the event in the years 1997 and 1998 (2) , before it moved to Genoa 1999 (3), Marseille 2000 (4) , Maastricht 2001 (5), and finally to Trieste 2002. The 2003 workshop was held in Kid , Germany, while the next editions will be in Kyoto, Japan (2004) and Essex, UK (2005). The full list of participants, titles of the invited lectures, papers and posters of WEHIA can be found in http ://econ . dea. it/wehia2. The workshop has been always very informal aiming to put together sch- ars of different disciplines working on interaction of heterogeneous "so- thing " (economists, physicists, biologists) . To facilitate participation there has not been conference fee . It aimed to be a locus for communicate and exchange results and experiences . Several collaborations started with the Workshop and it is not without pride that the organizers claim such a result. The WEHIA has had two pars: a pars desiruens and a pars adestruens.

3 Domenico Delli Gatti!, Mauro GallegatF, Alan P. Kirman ! ITEMQ, Catholic University, Milan, Italy 2 MET, University of Teramo, Italy 3 GREQAM, Universite d'Aix-Marseille, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and Institut Universitaire de France The economics of heterogeneity This volume contains a set of papers which pursue the aim of examining how the properties of aggregate economic variables are influenced by the actions and interactions of individuals. This has been the central theme of a series of workshops held at the University of Ancona, Italy, since 1996, whose general title is Workshops on Economics with Heterogeneous Interactive Agents (WEHIA for short). ! Considering the economy as a complex evolving system of interacting agents, one has to take seriously three fundamental issues: * the heterogeneity of the agents in the economy, * the ways in which agents interact, * the dynamic process which governs the evolution of the individual and the aggregate variables. The third issue concerns especially the idea that agents learn and adapt rather than calculate optimally (Anderson et aI. , 1988; Arthur et aI. , 1997; Allen, 1988.) As to the first issue, general equilibrium theory allows, of course, agents to be as heterogeneous as one wants but as the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu results have I The papers published in this book are a selected sample of the papers presented at the 3rd WEHIA workshop held at the University of Ancona on May 29-30,1998.

by exploiting the disequilibrium and non linear relationships among economic aggregates. Prom an empirical point of view, this approach resemblaces the old NBER view, according to which: "the business cycle [. . . ] consists of - pansions occurring at about the same time in many economic activities, f- lowed by similairly general recessions, contractions, and revivals which merge into the expansion phase of the next cyxle" (Burns and Mitchell, 1946). They add that the movement, although recurrent, is not periodic, lasting from 1 to 12 years, and it is not divisible into shorter cycles. Of course, both approaches are not free from limits and inconsistencies. In spite of the equilibrium approach having nowadays became the workhorse of modern macroeconomics, for example, their users still find enormous d- ficulties in explaining why small shocks produce large fluctuations. A well known argument in multi sector real business cycle models (see e. g. Long and Plosser, 1983) is that as the number of sectors or industries considered in the analysis becomes large, aggregate volatility must tend to zero very quickly. This result, which follows directly from the Law of Large Numbers (LLN), rests on the hypothesis that each sector is periodically buffeted with idiosyncratic, identically and independently distributed shocks to Total F- tor Productivity (TFP).

by exploiting the disequilibrium and non linear relationships among economic aggregates. Prom an empirical point of view, this approach resemblaces the old NBER view, according to which: "the business cycle [. . . ] consists of - pansions occurring at about the same time in many economic activities, f- lowed by similairly general recessions, contractions, and revivals which merge into the expansion phase of the next cyxle" (Burns and Mitchell, 1946). They add that the movement, although recurrent, is not periodic, lasting from 1 to 12 years, and it is not divisible into shorter cycles. Of course, both approaches are not free from limits and inconsistencies. In spite of the equilibrium approach having nowadays became the workhorse of modern macroeconomics, for example, their users still find enormous d- ficulties in explaining why small shocks produce large fluctuations. A well known argument in multi sector real business cycle models (see e. g. Long and Plosser, 1983) is that as the number of sectors or industries considered in the analysis becomes large, aggregate volatility must tend to zero very quickly. This result, which follows directly from the Law of Large Numbers (LLN), rests on the hypothesis that each sector is periodically buffeted with idiosyncratic, identically and independently distributed shocks to Total F- tor Productivity (TFP).

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:i) 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.ii) 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.iii) In the hope of being allowed to purport scientific claims, BAM relies on the assumption that individual purposefulbehaviours aggregates into regularities. Macro behaviour, however, can depart radically from what the individual units are trying to accomplish. It is in this sense that aggregate outcomes emerge from individual actions and interactions.