Alessandro Caiani

Agent Based-Stock Flow Consistent Macroeconomics: Towards a Benchmark Model

The global financial crisis has forced standard macroeconomics to re-examine the plausibility of its assumptions and the adequacy of the policy prescriptions flowing from those assumptions. We believe a renewal of macroeconomic thinking and macroeconomic modeling is possible by recognizing that our economies should be analyzed as complex adaptive systems. A coherent and exhaustive representation of the inter-linkages between the real and financial sides of the economy is vital as well. We propose a macroeconomic framework based on a novel combination of the Agent Based and Stock Flow Consistent approaches. This paper presents a benchmark model for this innovative approach. Our model depicts an economy with capital and credit in which different types of agents locally interact on different markets. We provide a detailed representation of individual agents’ balance sheets, ensuring the model accounting consistency at the micro, meso, and macro levels. We analyze the properties of our simulated economy under different configurations of agent heuristics, focusing in particular on the role of credit and investment. We explain in detail the logic followed to calibrate and validate the model. Results show that our benchmark model is able to reproduce many stylized facts observed in real world, thus representing a good starting point to test -- in the next works -- different economic policies and institutional setups. Finally, the relatively simple and flexible structure of the model opens up many possibilities for development of the framework along different lines, thus providing a fertile soil for new applications.

Innovation and finance: a stock flow consistent analysis of great surges of development

The present work aims at contributing to the recent stream of literature which attempts to link the Neo-Schumpeterian/Evolutionary and the Post-Keynesian theory. The paper adopts the Post-Keynesian Stock Flow Consistent modeling approach to analyze the process of development triggered by the emergence of a new-innovative productive sector into the economic system. The model depicts a multi-sectorial economy composed of consumption and capital goods industries, a banking sector and two households sectors: capitalists and wage earners. Furthermore, it provides an explicit representation of the stock market. In line with the Schumpeterian tradition, our work highlights the cyclical nature of the development process and stresses the relevance of the finance-innovation nexus, analyzing the feed-back effects between the real and financial sides of the economic system. In this way we aim at setting the basis of a comprehensive and coherent framework to study the relationship between technological change, demand and finance along the structural change process triggered by technological innovation.

A stock flow consistent analysis of a Schumpeterian innovation economy

Schumpeter argued that boom and bust cycles are inherent to the rise of innovation and constitute an unavoidable consequence of the way the capitalist system reacts to the emergence of a wave of innovations. This contribution aims to describe Schumpeterian economic development in a ‘monetary theory of production’ framework, emphasizing the crucial role played by credit creation, conceived as ‘the monetary complement’ of innovation. By adopting a stock flow consistent analytical approach, we analyze both the structural change process triggered in the real economy by the emergence of innovation, and the monetary dynamics arising during the various stages of the development process.

Does Inequality Hamper Innovation and Growth

The paper builds upon the Agent Based-Stock Flow Consistent model presented in Caiani et al. (2015) to analyze the relationship between income and wealth inequality and economic development. For this sake, the original model has been amended under three main dimensions: first, the households sector has been subdivided into workmen, office workers, researchers, and executives which compete on segmented labor markets. Conversely, firms are now characterized by a hierarchical organization structure which determines, according to firms’ output levels, their demand for each type of workers. Second, in order to account for the impact of income and wealth distribution on consumption patterns, different households classes - also representing different income groups - have diversified average propensities to consume and save. Finally, the model now embeds technological change in an evolutionary flavor, affecting labor productivity evolution in the consumption sector through product innovation in the capital sector, where firms invest in R&D and produce differentiated vintages of machineries. The model is then calibrated using realistic values for both income and wealth distribution across different income groups, and their average propensities to consume. Results of the simulation experiments suggest that more progressive tax schemes and labor market policies aiming to increase low and middle workers’ coordination, and to support their wage levels, concur to foster economic development and to reduce inequality, though the latter seem to be more effective under both respects. The model thus provides some evidence in favor of a wage-led growth regime, where improvements of middle-low levels workers’ conditions create positive systemic effects, which eventually trickle up also to high income-profit earners households.

Economics with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents: A Practical Guide to Agent-Based Modeling

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 RandC, 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.

Decentralized Interacting Macroeconomics and the Agent-Based “Modellaccio”

Abstract The chapter presents an excursus on the Agent-Based (AB) modeling approach in the field of macroeconomics, with a particular focus on the line of research pushed forward over the last decade by the AB research group at the Marche Polytechnic University of Ancona, to which the authors of this chapter and most of the contributors to the present book belong. The first part of the chapter provides an introduction to the methodology, summarizing its historical and theoretical roots and sketching out its main features. An overview of the recent AB macroeconomic literature is then provided, presenting some of the main “families” of models that have contributed to its development. The second part focuses on the most recent contributions in the field provided by the Ancona research group, which are the result of a research agenda aiming at combining the AB bottom-up approach to macroeconomics with the Post-Keynesian Stock Flow Consistent (SFC) modeling framework [59] . These efforts culminated into the release of a brand-new simulation tool suite in Java (the Java Macro Agent-Based (JMAB) platform), explicitly designed for AB-SFC models, and of a benchmark AB-SFC model [17] , dubbed “the AB Modellaccio.” In describing these two contributions and their successive refinements, we deepen several important theoretical and technical aspects of the AB-SFC modeling approach, and we argue that this novel framework has the potential to set an alternative paradigm in macromodeling. In the conclusions, we reflect on the current strengths and limits of the AB and SFC methodologies, highlighting the main challenges to be addressed in the next future.

Are Higher Wages Good for Business? An Assessment Under Alternative Innovation and Investment Scenarios

This paper aims at investigating the interplay between inequality, innovation dynamics, and investment behaviors in shaping the long-run patterns of development of a closed economy. By extending the analysis proposed in Caiani et al. (2017) we explore the effects of alternative wage regimes under different investment and technological change scenarios. Experiments results seem to de-emphasize the role of technological progress as a possible source of greater inequality. Overall, simulation results are consistent with the predominance of a wage-led growth regime in most of the scenarios analyzed: a faster growth of low and middle level workers’ wages, relative to managers’, generally exert beneficial effects on the economy and allows to counteract the labor-saving effects of technological progress. Furthermore, contrary to what is sometimes argued in the academic and political debate, a distribution more favorable to workers does not compromise firms’ profitability, but rather strengthen it creating a more favorable macroeconomic environment which encourages further innovations, stimulates investment, and sustains economic growth.

A Simple Model of Business Fluctuations with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents and Credit Networks

In what follows we firstly describe and then implement and simulate a very simple model, that is a simplified version of Riccetti et al. (2013), by using R. In the original paper, a multitude of heterogeneous firms and banks interact in the credit market. Firms want to produce and sell a homogeneous commodity in the goods market and, in order to finance production, they need credit from banks. Firms look at a random subset of potential partners (due to imperfect information) and then choose the most convenient bank (i.e. the bank charging the lowest interest rate); as a consequence, an endogenous network of credit interlinkages evolves over time. The model shows the emergence of business fluctuations and highlights both the role of financial fragility and network structure in shaping economic dynamics.

Innovation and Finance: A Stock Flow Consistent Analysis of Great Surges of Development

The present work aims at contributing to the recent stream of literature which attempts to link the Neo-Schumpeterian/Evolutionary and the Post-Keynesian theory. The paper adopts the Post-Keynesian Stock Flow Consistent modeling approach to analyze the process of development triggered by the emergence of a new-innovative productive sector into the economic system. The model depicts a multi-sectorial economy composed of consumption and capital goods industries, a banking sector and two households sectors: capitalists and wage earners. Furthermore, it provides an explicit representation of the stock market. In line with the Schumpeterian tradition, our work highlights the cyclical nature of the development process and stresses the relevance of the finance-innovation nexus, analyzing the feed-back effects between the real and financial sides of the economic system. In this way we aim at setting the basis of a comprehensive and coherent framework to study the relationship between technological change, demand and finance along the structural change process triggered by technological innovation.