A specification of the steps in designing a computational experiment to address a well-posed quantitative question, emphasizing that the computational experiment is an econometric tool used in the task of deriving the quantitative implications of theory.

The paper documents how cyclical fluctuations in market work vary over the life cycle and then assesses the predictions of a life-cycle version of the growth model for those observations. The analysis yields a simple but striking finding. The main discrepancy between the model and that data lies...