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

We’ve updated the paper, it can be accessed here. The abstract is below.

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.