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Who we are

 

 
 
 

Business cycles have been traditionally the main subject of macroeconomics but they need now to be explained in a new micro-meso-macro approach of reciprocal feedback.

Regular and erratic patterns turn out to be, thus, the result of co-evolution in variables and agents' behaviours.

 

Emerging macroeconomics

This book represents a true revolution in macroeconomics. Prefaced by Joseph Stiglitz, it summarizes a crucial strand of research based on heterogeneous agents addressing and explaining key stylized facts of real world.

The present version is still a draft but it represents already a must-read for economists.

Book

Author's homepage

 

Animal spirits, lumpy investment and endogenous business cycles

Going well beyond Real Business Cycle or New-Keynesian perspectives, this evolutionary model with fully micro-founded heterogeneous bounded-rational agents is able to generate self-sustaining patterns of long-term growth and endogenous business cycles.

The model can replicate the most important stylized facts concerning micro- and macro-economic dynamics, e.g. that investment is more volatile than GDP; consumption is less volatile than GDP; investment, consumption and change in stocks are procyclical and coincident variables; employment is procyclical; un-employment rate is anticyclical; firm size distributions are skewed but depart from log-normality; firm growth distributions are tent-shaped.

It doesn't rely on rational expectations nor on one fictious representative agent.

PDF


Key concepts

Gross Domestic Product

 

Consumption

 

Investment

 

Public expenditure

 

Exports

 

Imports

 

Unemployment

 

Employment

 

Productivity

 

Inflation

 

Profits

 

 

Key data

Long-term macroeconomic data for 136 countries and 42 years

The most user-friendly distribution of the main international database on GDP components (consumption, investment, public expenditure and net exports) for 136 countries and 42 years. Excellent for international comparisons, long-term growth enquiries and business cycle analysis, since it provides real values at constant prices comparable over time and countries.

MS Excel MS Access


Industry-level output, employment, costs, investment, capital stocks over 38 years

An excellent dataset for studying the evolution of hundreds of industries.

MS Excel [4 MB]

 

US data for all the variables in IS-LM model

Comprehensive of 54 variables in long-term annual and quarterly time-series, this US dataset is excellent for students to test the model as well as for researchers to develop original reflections.

MS Excel [104 KB]

 

EU data for all the variables in IS-LM model (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, UK, Switzerland and other 13 European countries)

MS Excel [550 KB]

 

Oil world prices (1861-1999)

A very long time-series of a crucial price for the world economy. Gain new insights in inflation tides and business cycles.

MS Excel [7 KB]

 

Papers

Inflation expectations: an empirical assessment

In this study, the presence of a marked degree of heterogeneity in the process of expectation formation is demostrated, using a large longitudinal survey: the Survey of Consumer Attitudes and Behavior, conducted by the Survey Research Center (SRC) at the University of Michigan, available at a monthly frequency from 1978.01.

Essay

 

After the Washington consensus: domestic pulled GDP growth can be more reliable and equitable than export-led growth

The point of view of a trade unionist.

Essay

 

Innovation and Growth: A Schumpeterian model of innovation

The creation of a positive feedback loop is what makes the difference between sustained growth and gradual (or sudden) decline. A Positive Feedback Loop Innovation System (POLIS) is here modelled along Schumpeterian lines and applied to the actual economy of Taiwan.

Essay


A new approach to business fluctuations: heterogeneous interacting agents, scaling laws and financial fragility

Business fluctuations in GDP, investment, etc. can be explained in a new way. The authors present a simple agent-based model, whose core is the interaction of heterogeneous financially fragile firms and a banking sector. In their framework, the origin of business fluctuations can be traced back to the ever changing configuration of the network of heterogeneous interacting firms.

Simulations of the model replicate surprisingly well an impressive set of stylized facts, particularly two well known universal laws.

Essay [300 KB]

 

Cognitive macroeconometrics paradoxes

Using data from the Business Surveys Unit of the European Commission as a long-running-continental-scale experiment, this paper examines how, and how accurately, people assess economic systems. Data show that people know the past better than the future and that there is a systematic bias in forecasts.

Essay

 

A model of primary and secondary waves in investment cycles

The large degree of independence of regional and sectoral economic variables with respect to their macroeconomic aggregates suggests that macroeconomic fluctuations are a consequence of microeconomic disturbances, rather than the reverse.

Uniting Schumpeter's concern for innovation with Keynes' concern for uncertainty and expectations formation, this article focuses on the behaviour of entrepreneurs confronting uncertainty caused by innovation. Entrepreneurs' behaviour is reconstructed by modelling the functioning of their cognitive processes when innovations appear. Recognition of the possibilities opened up by a successful innovation generates a state of optimism in the minds of single entrepreneurs, which eventually propagates to the whole economy triggering an investments upswing. Likewise, unsuccessful innovations can trigger a downswing.

Essay

 

Business cycles with firm-specific fixed costs and variable costs: a model

Essay

 

Business cycles with firm-specific fixed costs and variable costs: the Thai experience during the currency crisis

Essay

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