11,444 research outputs found

    Can a Representative-Agent Model Represent a Heterogeneous-Agent Economy?

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    Accounting for observed fluctuations in aggregate employment, consumption, and real wage using the optimality conditions of a representative household often requires preferences that are incompatible with economic priors (e.g., Mankiw, Rotemberg, and Summers 1985). This discrepancy between the equilibrium model and the aggregate data is often viewed as evidence of the failure of labor-market clearing. We argue that such a conclusion is premature. We construct a model economy where all prices are flexible and all markets clear at all times but household decisions are not readily aggregated because of incomplete capital markets and the indivisible nature of the labor supply. We demonstrate that if we were to explain the model-generated aggregate time series using decisions of a fictitious" stand-in household, such a household is likely to have a non-concave or unstable utility. Our analysis suggests that the representative-agent model often fails to represent an equilibrium outcome of a heterogeneous-agent economy.Representative-agent model, Aggregation, Heterogeneity, Incomplete Markets, Indivisible Labor, GMM Estimation

    Can a Representative-Agent Model Represent a Heterogeneous-Agent Economy?

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    Accounting for observed fluctuations in aggregate employment, consumption, and real wage using the optimality conditions of a representative household requires preferences that are incompatible with economic priors. In order to reconcile theory with data, we construct a model with heterogeneous agents whose decisions are difficult to aggregate because of incomplete capital markets and the indivisible nature of labor supply. If we were to explain the model-generated aggregate time series using decisions of a stand-in household, such a household must have a non-concave or unstable utility as is often found with the aggregate U.S. data.Representative-Agent Model, Heterogeneous Agent, Macroeconomics

    Increasing Market Interconnection: An analysis of the Italian Electricity Spot Market

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    In this paper we estimate the benefits resulting from interconnecting the Italian electricity spot market. The market is currently divided into two geographic zones – North and South – with limited interzonal transmission capacity that often induces congestion, and hence potential inefficiency. By simulating a fully interconnected market, we predict that the total spot market expenditure would reduce substantially. Moreover, since savings do not increase linearly with the size of new transmission capacity, even a slight increment to transmission capacity is found to bring substantial benefits to end users. Finally, our analysis shows that the (partly State owned) dominant firm in the market is not maximizing short-term profits.Transmission constraints, zonal pricing, congestion, electricity industry

    Rate of Price Discovery in Iterative Combinatorial Auctions

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    We study a class of iterative combinatorial auctions which can be viewed as subgradient descent methods for the problem of pricing bundles to balance supply and demand. We provide concrete convergence rates for auctions in this class, bounding the number of auction rounds needed to reach clearing prices. Our analysis allows for a variety of pricing schemes, including item, bundle, and polynomial pricing, and the respective convergence rates confirm that more expressive pricing schemes come at the cost of slower convergence. We consider two models of bidder behavior. In the first model, bidders behave stochastically according to a random utility model, which includes standard best-response bidding as a special case. In the second model, bidders behave arbitrarily (even adversarially), and meaningful convergence relies on properly designed activity rules

    Evaluating asset pricing models with limited commitment using household consumption data

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    We evaluate the asset pricing implications of a class of models in which risk sharing is imperfect because of the limited enforcement of intertemporal contracts. Lustig (2004) has shown that in such a model the asset pricing kernel can be written as a simple function of the aggregate consumption growth rate and the growth rate of consumption of the set of households that do not face binding enforcement constraints in that state of the world. These unconstrained households have lower consumption growth rates than constrained households, i.e. they are located in the lower tail of the crosssectional consumption growth distribution. We use household consumption data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey to estimate the pricing kernel implied by the model and to evaluate its performance in pricing aggregate risk. We employ the same data to construct aggregate consumption and to derive the standard complete markets pricing kernel. We find that the limited enforcement pricing kernel generates a market price of risk that is substantially larger than the standard complete markets asset pricing kernel. Klassifizierung: G12, D53, D52, E4

    Bidding Strategy with Forecast Technology Based on Support Vector Machine in Electrcity Market

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    The participants of the electricity market concern very much the market price evolution. Various technologies have been developed for price forecast. SVM (Support Vector Machine) has shown its good performance in market price forecast. Two approaches for forming the market bidding strategies based on SVM are proposed. One is based on the price forecast accuracy, with which the being rejected risk is defined. The other takes into account the impact of the producer's own bid. The risks associated with the bidding are controlled by the parameters setting. The proposed approaches have been tested on a numerical example.Comment: 8pages, 13figures, paper for the conference "Applications of Physics in Financial Analysis 6th International Conference

    International Capital Flows

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    The sharp increase in both gross and net capital flows over the past two decades has led to a renewed interest in their determinants. Most existing theories of international capital flows are in the context of models with only one asset, which only have implications for net capital flows, not gross flows. Moreover, there is no role for capital flows as a result of changing expected returns and risk-characteristics of assets as there is no portfolio choice. In this paper we develop a method for solving dynamic stochastic general equilibrium open-economy models with portfolio choice. We show why standard first and second-order solution methods no longer work in the presence of portfolio choice, and extend them giving special treatment to the optimality conditions for portfolio choice. We apply the solution method to a particular two-country, two-good, two-asset model and show that it leads to a much richer understanding of both gross and net capital flows. The approach highlights time-varying portfolio shares, resulting from time-varying expected returns and risk characteristics of the assets, as a potential key source of international capital flows.

    On spatial dynamics.

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    It has long been recognized that the forces that lead to the agglomeration of economic activity and to aggregate growth are similar. Unfortunately, few formal frameworks have been advanced to explore this link. We critically discuss the literature and present a simple framework that can circumvent some of the main obstacles we identify. We discuss the main characteristics of an equilibrium allocation in this dynamic spatial framework, present a numerical example to illustrate the forces at work, and provide some supporting empirical evidence.Dynamic spatial models; Technology di usion; Spillovers; Trade; Factor Mobility; Growth;
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