Monte Carlo Simulation of Macroeconomic Risk with a Continuum of Agents: The Symmetric Case

October 2001 <p> Suppose a large economy with individual risk is modeled by a continuum of pairwise exchangeable random variables (i.i.d., in particular). Then the relevant stochastic process is jointly measurable only in degenerate cases. Yet in Monte Carlo simulation, the average of a large finite draw of the random variables converges almost surely. Several necessary and sufficient conditions for such "Monte Carlo convergence" are given. Also, conditioned on the associated Monte Carlo sigma-algebra, which represents macroeconomic risk, individual agents' random shocks are independent. Furthermore, a converse to one version of the classical law of large numbers is proved. <p> Working Papers Index