The nature of computing is changing and it poses both challenges and opportunities for economists. Instead of increasing clock speed, future microprocessors will have "multi-cores" with separate execution units. "Threads" or other multi-processing techniques that are rarely used today are...

Optimization algorithms must be among the most common numerical methods used by economists. Yet, there is surprisingly little guidance on choosing the appropriate one. This problem is most notable with regard to conventional versus global optimizers. Typically, a global optimizer is used when a...