With the help of two examples, we illustrate the usefulness of agent-based models as a tool for economic policy design. In our first example, we apply a financial market model in which the order flow of speculators, relying on technical and fundamental analysis, generates intricate price...

Within the seminal cobweb model of Brock and Hommes, firms adapt their price expectations by a profit-based switching behavior between free näive expectations and costly rational expectations. Brock and Hommes demonstrate that fixed-point dynamics may turn into increasingly complex dynamics as...

We develop a simple agent-based financial market model in which heterogeneous speculators apply technical and fundamental analysis to trade in two different stock markets. Speculators' strategy/market selections are repeated at each time step and depend on predisposition effects, herding...

We develop a financial market model with interacting chartists and fundamentalists that embeds the famous bull and bear market model of Huang and Day as a special case. Their model is given by a one-dimensional continuous piecewise-linear map. Our model, on the other hand, is more flexible and...

We develop a simple two-region, cobweb-type dynamic equilibrium model to demonstrate the existence of optimal trade barriers. A pure comparative statics analysis of our model suggests that a reduction of trade barriers always enhances welfare. However, taking a dynamic perspective reveals that...

In the framework of small-scale agent-based financial market models, the paper starts out from the concept of structural stochastic volatility, which derives from different noise levels in the demand of fundamentalists and chartists and the time-varying market shares of the two groups. It...

This paper proposes a simple asset pricing model with three groups of traders: chartists who believe in the persistence of bull and bear markets, fundamentalists who bet on a reduction of the observed mispricing, and investors who follow a buy-and-hold strategy. The innovative feature of the...

Remittances as one of the main benefits of international migration have a great and important impact on the countries of origins and make migration a topic of special interest for many researchers. Workers' remittances represent an important financial flows and a major source of private external...