Over the past two decades, financial market crises with similar features have occurred in different regions of the world. Unstable cross-market linkages during a crisis are referred to as financial contagion. We simulate crisis transmission in the context of a model of market participants adopting various strategies; this allows testing for financial contagion under alternative scenarios. Using...

This paper inverts the usual logic of applied optimal income taxation. It starts from the observed distribution of income before and after redistribution and corresponding marginal tax rates. Under a set of simplifying assumptions, it is then possible to recover the social welfare function that would make the observed marginal tax rate schedule optimal. In this framework, the issue of the optim...

This paper builds upon a view of economic organizations as problemsolving arrangements and presents a simple model of adaptive problemsolving driven by trial-and-error learning and collective selection. Institutional structures, and in particular their degree of decentralization, determines which solutions are tried out and undergo selection. It is shown that if the design problem at hand is “c...

A fundamental mathematical problem is to "nd a solution to a square system of nonlinear equations. There are many methods to approach this problem, the most famous of which is Newton's method. In this paper, we describe a generalization of this problem, the complementarity problem. We show how such problems are modeled within the GAMS modeling language and provide details about the PATH solver,...

Structural change has been conjectured to lead to an upward bias in the estimated forward expectations coefficient in New-Keynesian Phillips curves. We present a simple New-Keynesian model that enables us to assess this proposition. In particular, we investigate the issue of upward bias in the estimated coefficients of the expectations variable in the New-Keynesian Phillips curve based on a mod...

We show how to implement arbitrage-free models of the short-term interest rate in a discretetime setting that allows a continuum of rates at any particular date. Discrete time allows approximate pricing of interest rate contingent claims that cannot be valued in continuous-time models. It is usually associated with discrete states, with possible interest rates restricted to a limited number of ...

There is an increasing trend towards global financial consolidation. Empirical evidence has shown that though consolidation can promote market efficiency, it can also increase systemic risk. Therefore, understanding the effects of company mergers on the financial markets is an increasingly pertinent issue. This paper presents a multi-market agent-based model of endogenous merger formation, cons...

We develop methods to compute equilibria in dynamic models with incomplete asset markets and heterogeneous agents. Using spline interpolation methods we approximate recursive trading policies of the agents and the equilibrium pricing functions. We explore various methods for determining the coe$cients of these approximations, including time iteration methods and acceleration techniques. Explori...

Tax-Benefit Systems in Europe and the US: Between Equity and Efficiency Whether observed differences in redistributive policies across countries are the result of differences in social preferences or efficiency constraints is an important question that paves the debate about the optimality of welfare regimes. To shed new light on this question, we estimate labor supply elasticities on microdata...

In perturbation analysis of nonlinear dynamic systems, the presence of a bifurcation implies that the first-order behavior of the economy cannot be characterized solely in terms of the first-order derivatives of the model equations. In this paper, we use two simple examples to illustrate how to detect the existence of a bifurcation. Following the general approach of Judd (1998), we then show ho...