In this paper, I examine the welfare consequences of conventional approximation methods in business cycle analysis: the log-linear approximation of model dynamics and the second-order approximation of social welfare. In a canonical New Keynesian model, the approximation around the deterministic...

Time-consistency is a key feature of many important policy problems, such as those relating to optimal fiscal policy and optimal monetary policy. It is also important for private-sector decision-making through mechanisms such as quasi-hyperbolic discounting. These problems are generally solved...

We develop approximate estimation methods for exponential random graph models (ERGMs), whose likelihood is proportional to an intractable normalizing constant. The usual approach approximates this constant with Monte Carlo simulations, however convergence may be exponentially slow. We propose a...

A principal distinction of neural network based methods of approximation from conventional methods is a hidden inside algorithmic function, which is defined by the neural network topology and is enough sophisticated to make appropriate fitting process. There is a new construction named...