Financial Fragility and Economic Fluctuations: Numerical Simulations and Policy Implications

This paper proposes a simple prototype model that describes the complex dynamics of a sophisticated monetary economy. The interaction between the current and intertemporal financial constraints of economic units brings about irregular fluctuations at the micro and macro levels. By means of qualitative dynamic analysis and numerical simulations, we reformulate in more operational terms, and extend in a number of new directions, the model suggested recently by one of the authors (Vercelli, 2000) to study the interaction between financial fragility, modelled in terms of structural instability, and dynamically unstable financial fluctuations.