We develop an agent-based simulation of the catastrophe insurance and reinsurance industry and use it to study the problem of risk model homogeneity. The model simulates the balance sheets of insurance firms, who collect premiums from clients in return for ensuring them against intermittent,...

Productivity levels and growth are extremely heterogeneous among firms. A vast literature has developed to explain the origins of productivity shocks, their dispersion, evolution and their relation- ship to the business cycle. We examine in detail the distribution of labor productivity levels...

We develop an agent-based simulation of the catastrophe insurance and reinsurance industry and use it to study the problem of risk model homogeneity. The model simulates the balance sheets of insurance firms, who collect premiums from clients in return for ensuring them against intermittent,...

It is well-known that value added per worker is extremely heterogeneous among firms, but relatively little has been done to characterize this heterogeneity more precisely. Here we show that the distribution of value-added per worker exhibits heavy tails, a very large support, and consistently...

We study a simplification of a previously proposed model of technology evolution to understand the behavior of performance curves, which describe how a technology improves with increasing cumulative production. The model decomposes a technology or production process into components that get...

A key challenge in modeling technological innovation is to predict future costs based on historical data. This is of great interest to academics, as well as decision makers both in the private and public sectors. For example, many corporate strategies, industry roadmaps, and government policies...

Desarrollamos un modelo basado en agentes para estudiar el impacto de experimentos de política macroprudencial sobre los principales indicadores del mercado inmobiliario del Reino Unido. La naturaleza heterogénea de este modelo nos permite evaluar el efecto de tales experimentos sobre los...

For many products, increases in cumulative production are associated with de- creasing unit costs. However, a serious problem of reverse causality (lower prices leading to increasing demand) makes it difficult to use this relationship for pol- icy. We study World War II, during which the demand...

Putting a price on carbon is critical for climate change policy. Increasingly, policymakers combine multiple policy tools to achieve this, for example by complementing cap-and-trade schemes with a carbon tax, or with a feed-in tariff. Often, the motivation for doing so is to limit undesirable...

Conventional cost-benefit analysis incorporates the normally reasonable assumption that the policy or project under examination is marginal in the sense that it will not significantly change relative prices. In particular, it is assumed that the policy or project does not change the underlying...