IHS Researcher Michael Miess and IHS Fellow Sebastian Poledna are among the winners of the "Rebuilding Macroeconomics Complexity Prize". On Friday, 21st the authors of the winning papers hold a presentation for a general audience.
In their awarded paper "Economic forecasting with an agent-based model", Sebastian Poledna and Michael Miess, together with Cars Hommes, designed, implemented and simulated a new prototype of agent-based modelling (ABM). ABM has been a promising technology for decades, with the hope that it would push forward innovation in macroeconomic modelling. This hope has rested on the notion that by using modern computer technology, an economy can be modelled more realistically and based on large amounts of data (“big data”). However, most agent-based models have so far remained at the stage of describing hypothetical or experimental economies. The prototype, developed by the three economists, is more stable than the ABMs common in the literature, and is therefore suitable for forecasting and evaluating policy measures.
‘Rebuilding Macroeconomics’ is a four-year project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and hosted by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, which aims to construct a research network promoting interdisciplinary approaches to the study of macroeconomics, and to make recommendations for the future direction of research in this area.