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...

We propose a general protocol for calibration and validation of complex simulation models by an approach based on discovery and comparison of causal structures. The key idea is that configurations of parameters of a given theoretical model are selected by minimizing a distance index between two...

We propose a statistical identification procedure for recursive 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...

This paper revisits Ernst Engel's (1857) original article in which he systematically investigated the relationship between consumption expenditure and income. While he is mainly remembered today for the discovery of Engel's law, we highlight how Engel addressed in a particular way the issue of...

Certain properties of Engel curves have been linked to the occurrence of structural change in the economy (Pasinetti 1981, Metcalfe et al. 2006, Saviotti 2001). From an empirical perspective, however, very little has been done to examine (i) whether indeed satiation is a general property of...

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...

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...

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...

By representing a system of budget shares as an approximate factor model we determine its rank, i.e. the number of common functional forms, or factors and we estimate a base of the factor space by means of approximate principal components. We assume that the extracted factors span the same space...

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...