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The blood of Rome
It is AD 55. As trouble brews on the eastern fringes of the Roman Empire, Prefect Cato and Centurion Macro prepare for war ... The wily Parthian Empire has invaded Roman-ruled Armenia, ousting King Rhadamistus. The King is ambitious and ruthless, but he is loyal to Rome. General Corbulo must restore him to power, while also readying the troops for war with Parthia. Corbulo welcomes new arrivals Cato and Macro, experienced soldiers who know how to knock into shape an undermanned unit of men ill-equipped for conflict. But Rhadamistus's brutality towards those who ousted him will spark an uprising which will test the bravery of the Roman army to the limit. While the enemy watches from over the border ...
On the future of macroeconomic models
Macroeconomics has been under scrutiny as a field since the financial crisis, which brought an abrupt end to the optimism of the Great Moderation. There is widespread acknowledgement that the prevailing dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models performed poorly, but little agreement on what alternative future paradigm should be pursued. This article is the elaboration of four blog posts that together present a clear message: current DSGE models are flawed, but they contain the right foundations and must be improved rather than discarded. Further, we need different types of macroeconomic models for different purposes. Specifically, there should be five kinds of general equilibrium models: a common core, plus foundational theory, policy, toy, and forecasting models. The different classes of models have a lot to learn from each other, but the goal of full integration has proven counterproductive. No model can be all things to all people.
Journal Article
Brothers in blood
The Roman Empire's conquest of Britannia is under threat from within. A messenger on the streets of Rome has been intercepted and tortured, revealing a plot to sabotage the Roman army's campaign against Caratacus, commander of Britannia's native tribes. A treacherous agent's mission is to open a second front of attack against them and eliminate the two Roman soldiers who could stand in the way. Unwarned, the Prefect Cato and the Centurion Macro are with the Roman army pursuing Caratacus and his men through the mountains of Britannia. Defeating Caratacus seems within their grasp. But the plot against the two heroes threatens not only their military goals but also their lives.
Rational Inattention
We review the recent literature on rational inattention, identify the main theoretical mechanisms, and explain how it helps us understand a variety of phenomena across fields of economics. The theory of rational inattention assumes that agents cannot process all available information, but they can choose which exact pieces of information to attend to. Several important results in economics have been built around imperfect information. Nowadays, many more forms of information than ever before are available due to new technologies, and yet we are able to digest little of it. Which form of imperfect information we possess and act upon is thus largely determined by which information we choose to pay attention to. These choices are driven by current economic conditions and imply behavior that features numerous empirically supported departures from standard models. Combining these insights about human limitations with the optimizing approach of neoclassical economics yields a new, generally applicable model.
Journal Article
MEASURING ECONOMIC POLICY UNCERTAINTY
We develop a new index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) based on newspaper coverage frequency. Several types of evidence—including human readings of 12,000 newspaper articles—indicate that our index proxies for movements in policy-related economic uncertainty. Our U.S. index spikes near tight presidential elections, Gulf Wars I and II, the 9/11 attacks, the failure of Lehman Brothers, the 2011 debt ceiling dispute, and other major battles over fiscal policy. Using firm-level data, we find that policy uncertainty is associated with greater stock price volatility and reduced investment and employment in policy-sensitive sectors like defense, health care, finance, and infrastructure construction. At the macro level, innovations in policy uncertainty foreshadow declines in investment, output, and employment in the United States and, in a panel vector autoregressive setting, for 12 major economies. Extending our U.S. index back to 1900, EPU rose dramatically in the 1930s (from late 1931) and has drifted upward since the 1960s.
Journal Article
HOUSEHOLD DEBT AND BUSINESS CYCLES WORLDWIDE
An increase in the household debt to GDP ratio predicts lower GDP growth and higher unemployment in the medium run for an unbalanced panel of 30 countries from 1960 to 2012. Low mortgage spreads are associated with an increase in the household debt to GDP ratio and a decline in subsequent GDP growth, highlighting the importance of credit supply shocks. Economic forecasters systematically over-predict GDP growth at the end of household debt booms, suggesting an important role of flawed expectations formation. The negative relation between the change in household debt to GDP and subsequent output growth is stronger for countries with less flexible exchange rate regimes. We also uncover a global household debt cycle that partly predicts the severity of the global growth slowdown after 2007. Countries with a household debt cycle more correlated with the global household debt cycle experience a sharper decline in growth after an increase in domestic household debt.
Journal Article
Behavioral and Experimental Macroeconomics and Policy Analysis
This survey discusses behavioral and experimental macroeconomics, emphasizing a complex systems perspective. The economy consists of boundedly rational heterogeneous agents who do not fully understand their complex environment and use simple decision heuristics. Central to our survey is the question of under which conditions a complex macro-system of interacting agents may or may not coordinate on the rational equilibrium outcome. A general finding is that under positive expectations feedback (strategic complementarity)—where optimistic (pessimistic) expectations can cause a boom (bust)—coordination failures are quite common. The economy is then rather unstable, and persistent aggregate fluctuations arise strongly amplified by coordination on trend-following behavior leading to (almost-)self-fulfilling equilibria. Heterogeneous expectations and heuristics switching models match this observed micro and macro behavior surprisingly well. We also discuss policy implications of this coordination failure on the perfectly rational aggregate outcome and how policy can help to manage the self-organization process of a complex economic system.
Journal Article
Role of biochar in promoting circular economy in the agriculture sector. Part 1: A review of the biochar roles in soil N, P and K cycles
Recently, biochar has been widely used for versatile applications in agriculture and environment sectors as an effective tool to minimise waste and to increase the efficiency of circular economy. In the present work, we review the current knowledge about biochar role in N, P and K cycles. Ammonia volatilisation and N2O emission can be reduced by biochar addition. The content of available P can be improved by biochar through enhancement of solubilisation and reduction in P fixation on soil mineral, whilst high extractable K in biochar contributes to K cycle in soil. Liming effect and high CEC are important properties of biochars improving beneficial interactions with N, P and K soil cycle processes. The effectiveness of biochar on N, P and K cycles is associated with biochar properties which are mainly affected by feedstock type and pyrolysis condition.
Journal Article
Quantum Computing and Deep Learning Methods for GDP Growth Forecasting
Precise macroeconomic forecasting is one of the major aims of economic analysis because it facilitates a timely assessment of future economic conditions and can be used for monetary, fiscal, and economic policy purposes. Numerous works have studied the behavior of the macroeconomic situation and have developed models to forecast them. However, the existing models have limitations, and the literature demands more research on the subject given that the accuracy of the models is still poor, and they have only been expanded for developed countries. This paper presents a comparison of methodologies for GDP growth forecasting and, consequently, new forecasting models of GDP growth have been constructed with the ability to estimate accurately future scenarios globally. A sample of 70 countries was used, which has allowed the use of sample combinations that consider the regional heterogeneity of the warning indicators. To the sample under study, different methods have been applied to achieve a high accuracy model, comparing Quantum Computing with Deep Learning procedures, being Deep Neural Decision Trees, which has provided excellent prediction results thanks to large-scale processing with mini-batch-based learning and can be connected to any larger Neural Networks model. Our model has a great potential impact on the adequacy of macroeconomic policy, providing tools that help to achieve macroeconomic and monetary stability at the global level, and creating new methodological opportunities for GDP growth forecasting.
Journal Article
Macroeconomic Uncertainty Indices Based on Nowcast and Forecast Error Distributions
We propose new indices to measure macroeconomic uncertainty. The indices measure how unexpected a realization of a representative macroeconomic variable is relative to the unconditional forecast error distribution. We use forecast error distributions based on the nowcasts and forecasts of the Survey of Professional Forecasters. We further compare the new indices with those proposed in the literature and assess their macroeconomic impact.
Journal Article