Chaotic Economic Dynamics

The new science of chaos was discovered in the analysis of weather. According to the author, economics is equally unpredictable. This book explores the way in which chaos may be used for economic analysis. The author applies the new insights of chaotic dynamics to economics. Given the unpredictable behaviour of economies, this new discipline promises much enlightenment. It has always been assumed that the highly irregular behaviour of economic time series was the consequence of extra-economic disturbances such as political decisions, trade unions, the weather, and foreign trade. Now it has become clear that there can be patterns which explain this confusing behaviour. - ;Capitalism as creative, chaotic evolution by structural change; Classical dynamics: the corn economy; The von Neumann model as a chaotic attractor; Growing in short and long waves; The structural and dynamical instability of the modern economy; An analysis of high and low growth rates; Irregular waves of growth from structural innovation; Dynamical control of economic waves by fiscal policy; A fresh look at traditional cycle models; Chaotic aperiodic behaviour from forced oscillators; Further reading; Index -

From Catastrophe to Chaos: A General Theory of Economic Discontinuities presents and unusual perspective on economics and economic analysis. Current economic theory largely depends upon assuming that the world is fundamentally continuous. However, an increasing amount of economic research has been done using approaches that allow for discontinuities such as catastrophe theory, chaos theory, synergetics, and fractal geometry. The spread of such approaches across a variety of disciplines of thought has constituted a virtual intellectual revolution in recent years. This book reviews the applications of these approaches in various subdisciplines of economics and draws upon past economic thinkers to develop an integrated view of economics as a whole from the perspective of inherent discontinuity.

In recent years economists have begun to use the techniques of non-linear dynamics to show that some apparently erratic and turbulent economic phenomena reflect subtle underlying patterns. How do cyclic and chaotic dynamics arise in economic models of equilibrium? How can empirical methods be used to detect nonlinearities and cyclic and chaotic structures in economic models? In examining these questions, this book brings together the most significant work that has been done to date in economics-based chaos theory. Selected here particularly for the economist who is not a specialist in chaos theory, the essays, some previously unpublished and others not widely available, describe a new tool for understanding business cycles, stabilization policy, and forecasting. The contributors to the volume are William J. Baumol, Jess Benhabib, Michele Boldrin, William A. Brock, Richard H. Day, Raymond J. Deneckere, Allan Drazen, Jean-Michel Grandmont, Kenneth L. Judd, Bruno Jullien, Guy Laroque, Blake LeBaron, Bruce McNevin, Luigi Montrucchio, Salih Nefti, Kazuo Nishimura, James B. Ramsey, Pietro Reichlin, Philip Rothman, Chera L. Sayers, Jos A. Scheinkman, Wayne Shafer, William Whitesell, Edward N. Wolff, and Michael Woodford.

The plan to publish the present book arose while I was preparing a joint work with Gunter Gabisch (Gabisch, G. /Lorenz, H. -W. : Business Cycle Theory. Berlin-Heidel berg-New York: Springer). It turned out that a lot of interesting material could only be sketched in a business cycle text, either because the relevance for business cycle theory was not evident or because the material required an interest in dynamical economics which laid beyond the scope of a survey text for advanced undergraduates. While much of the material enclosed in this book can be found in condensed and sometimes more or less identical form in that business cycle text, the present monograph attempts to present nonlinear dynamical economics in a broader context with economic examples from other fields than business cycle theory. It is a pleasure for me to acknowledge the critical comments, extremely detailed remarks, or suggestions by many friends and colleagues. The responses to earlier versions of the manuscript by W. A. Barnett, M. Boldrin, W. A. Brock, C. Chiarella, C. Dale, G. Feichtinger, P. Flaschel, D. K. Foley, R. M. Goodwin, D. Kelsey, M. Lines, A. Medio, L. Montrucchio, P. Read, C. Sayers, A. Schmutzler, H. Schnabl, G. Silverberg, H. -\'\!. Sinn, J. Sterman, and R. Tscherning not only encouraged me to publish the book in its present form but helped to remove numerous errors (not only typographic ones) and conceptnal misunderstandings and flaws. Particular thanks go to G.

Brock, Hsieh, and LeBaron show how the principles of chaos theory can be applied to such areas of economics and finance as the changing structure of stock returns and nonlinearity in foreign exchange.

The modelling of economic models by means of dynamic systems.

DIVApplications of chaos theory in political science, economics, and sociology /div