General Economics and Teaching

摘要

This book is a very welcome addition to the growing literature on agent-based modeling (ABM) in economics. It offers a hands-on introduction to ABM in macroeconomics and finance by carefully walking the reader through the construction of two such models in the programming languages R and C, respectively. These models are built up from scratch, and the reader is guided through performing a variety of computational experiments, as well as the collection and analysis of the data that are generated by these experiments. The modeling exercises covered here strike a good balance between simplicity and rigor, and so the volume serves as an excellent introductory tutorial for building models and conducting research on ABMs in macroeconomics and finance. There is also a chapter that provides a very useful review of heavy-tailed distributions that are relevant to ABM. Code for the programs developed in the book is included online, as is code for the end-of-chapter exercises.