Economic growth tends to stimulate fundamental changes in consumption patterns as consumers who get rich tend to spread their spending more evenly across a wider variety of goods and services. Comparing cross sectional spending patterns across rich and poor countries, we investigate how this...

The identification of a VAR requires differentiating between correlation and causation. This paper presents a method to deal with this problem. Graphical models, which provide a rigorous language to analyze the statistical and logical properties of causal relations, associate a particular set of...

In this paper we present a semi-automated search procedure to deal with the problem of the identification of the causal structure related to a vector autoregressive model. The structural form of the model is described by a directed graph and from the analysis of the partial correlations of the...

We propose a statistical identification procedure for structural vector autoregressive (VAR) models that present a nonlinear dependence (at least) at the contemporaneous level. By applying and adapting results from the literature on causal discovery with continuous additive noise models to...

As people become richer they get the opportunity of consuming more but also qualitatively better goods. This holds for a basic commodity like food as well. We investigate food consumption in Russia, taking into account both expenditure and nutrition value in terms of calories. We analyze how...

This paper addresses the problem of finding the appropriate method for conducting empirical validation in agent-based (AB) models, which is often regarded as the Achilles’ heel of the AB approach to economic modelling. The paper has two objectives. First, to identify key issues facing AB...

In this paper, we investigate the causal effects of public and private debts on U.S. output dynamics. We estimate a battery of Cointegrated Structural Vector Autoregressive models, and we identify structural shocks by employing Independent Component Analysis, a data-driven technique which avoids...

We build an agent-based model populated by households with heterogenous and time-varying financial conditions in order to study how different inequality shocks affect income dynamics and the effects of different types of fiscal policy responses. We show that inequality shocks generate persistent...

This study investigates the effects of a monetary policy shock on real output and prices, by means of a novel distribution-free nonrecursive identification scheme for structural vector autoregressions. Structural shocks are assumed to be mutually independent. The identification procedure is...

Since the influential survey by Windrum et al. (2007), research on empirical validation of agent-based models in economics has made substantial advances, thanks to a constant flow of high-quality contributions. This Chapter attempts to take stock of such recent literature to offer an updated...