Dynamic Economic Problems With Regime Switches

This book presents the state of the art in the relatively new field of dynamic economic modelling with regime switches. The contributions, written by prominent scholars in the field, focus on dynamic decision problems with regime changes in underlying dynamics or objectives. Such changes can be externally driven or internally induced by decisions. Utilising the most advanced mathematical methods in optimal control and dynamic game theory, the authors address a broad range of topics, including capital accumulation, innovations, financial decisions, population economics, environmental and resource economics, institutional change and the dynamics of addiction. Given its scope, the book will appeal to all scholars interested in mathematical and quantitative economics.

This interdisciplinary book argues that the economy has an underlying non-linear structure and that business cycles are endogenous, which allows a greater explanatory power with respect to the traditional assumption that dynamics are stochastic and shocks are exogenous. The first part of this work is formal-methodological and provides the mathematical background needed for the remainder, while the second part presents the view that signal processing involves construction and deconstruction of information and that the efficacy of this process can be measured. The third part focuses on economics and provides the related background and literature on economic dynamics and the fourth part is devoted to new perspectives in understanding nonlinearities in economic dynamics: growth and cycles. By pursuing this approach, the book seeks to (1) determine whether, and if so where, common features exist, (2) discover some hidden features of economic dynamics, and (3) highlight specific indicators of structural changes in time series. Accordingly, it is a must read for everyone interested in a better understanding of economic dynamics, business cycles, econometrics and complex systems, as well as non-linear dynamics and chaos theory.

This book includes papers presented at the ISDG12-GTM2019 International Meeting on Game Theory, as a joint meeting of the 12th International ISDG Workshop and the 13th "International Conference on Game Theory and Management”, held in St. Petersburg in July 2019. The topics cover a wide range of game-theoretic models and include both theory and applications, including applications to management.

Given the industrialized world’s historical dependence on fossil fuel-based energy resources and the now-realized perils of moving beyond the earth’s carbon budget, this book explores the myriad challenges of climate change and in reaching a low-carbon economy. Reconciling the medium-term competing, yet frequently complementary, needs for transition policies, the book provides guidelines for complex and often conflicting climate policy tasks. The book presents empirical trends in the use of carbon-emitting resources and evaluates market-driven short-termism and its adverse impact on resource use and the environment; it emphasizes a medium-term macroeconomic perspective for the transition. The authors attempt a paradigm shift towards a framework of sustainable macroeconomics. They survey relevant historical models, conduct empirical and numerical analyses of the climate change-relevant dynamic models, provide empirical illustrations, and evaluate diverse policy options and implementations together with their historical evolution. New analytical issues are also considered, e.g., strategic behavior in the energy and resource sectors, energy competition and the dynamics of market shares in new energy technology, and supporting policies for dealing with the tipping points encountered in climate change. The authors suggest a multitude of market-based strategies and public fiscal, monetary, and financial policies, and longer-run planning for resource extraction -all suitable for driving sustainable growth and a transformation of the energy sector. The book also examines the multiple delaying forces slowing the transition to a low-carbon economy; these typically arise from short-termism, lock-ins, irreversibility, leakages, non-cooperative games, and other political strategies. Thus, they explain the snail’s pace evolution of current national and global climate policies. The book will appeal to scholars and students of economics and environmental science. It is also relevant for policymakers and practitioners in multilateral institutions, research institutions as well as governments and ministries of countries interested in alternative energy sources, climate economists, and those who study the implementation of sustainable and low carbon-based policies.

This highly interdisciplinary volume brings together a carefully curated set of case studies examining complex systems with multiple time scales (MTS) across a variety of fields: materials science, epidemiology, cell physiology, mathematics, climatology, energy transition planning, ecology, economics, sociology, history, and cultural studies. The book addresses the vast diversity of interacting processes underlying the behaviour of different complex systems, highlighting the multiplicity of characteristic time scales that are a common feature of many and showcases a rich variety of methodologies across disciplinary boundaries. Self-organizing, out-of-equilibrium, ever-evolving systems are ubiquitous in the natural and social world. Examples include the climate, ecosystems, living cells, epidemics, the human brain, and many socio-economic systems across history. Their dynamical behaviour poses great challenges in the pressing context of the climate crisis, since they may involve nonlinearities, feedback loops, and the emergence of spatial-temporal patterns, portrayed by resilience or instability, plasticity or rigidity; bifurcations, thresholds and tipping points; burst-in excitation or slow relaxation, and worlds of other asymptotic behaviour, hysteresis, and resistance to change. Chapters can be read individually by the reader with special interest in such behaviours of particular complex systems or in specific disciplinary perspectives. Read together, however, the case studies, opinion pieces, and meta-studies on MTS systems presented and analysed here combine to give the reader insights that are more than the sum of the book's individual chapters, as surprising similarities become apparent in seemingly disparate and unconnected systems. MTS systems call into question naïve perceptions of time and complexity, moving beyond conventional ways of description, analysis, understanding, modelling, numerical prediction, and prescription of the world around us. This edited collection presents new ways of forecasting, introduces new means of control, and -- perhaps as the most demanding task -- it singles out a sustainable description of an MTS system under observation, offering a more nuanced interpretation of the floods of quantitative data and images made available by high- and low-frequency measurement tools in our unprecedented era of information flows.

The initial purposes of this book were to update and extend the discussion and the results presented ill our previous book, The Labor Market and Business Cycle Theories. Our 1990 article, which appeared in The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, represented a first step in this direction. The consequences of this effort have materialized in a number of new chapters that has led de facto to a new book, in which the surviving parts have been largely revised. The 1989 book was too mathematically oriented for many Keynesians and post Keynesians to be fully appreciated and insufficiently microfounded for both new classicals and new-Keynesians to be warmly accepted, yet we received positive and encouraging comments, and it was sold out very quickly. It was an attempt to dis cuss dynamics in Keynesian terms, based on a double assumption that maintains its validity-that both economic facts and analytical and methodological innova tions had contributed to a renewed interest in business cycles, which over time has had its "ups and downs." Since then, many more articles and books have appeared, stressing in particular the role of microfoundations and of nonlinearities in shaping business cycle theory.

The value of applying system-theoretic concepts to economic modelling problems arises from the fact that it offers a unifying framework for modelling dynamic systems. In addition to offering this powerful conceptual framework, it provides a wide range of tools useful in applied work. System-theoretic techniques enter predominantly two stages of economic modelling efforts: the stage of model construction and the stage of model application in accordance with the modelling. The objective of this and subsequent volumes on System-Theoretic Methods in Economic Modelling I is to initiate and/or intensify dialogues between researchers and practitioners within and across the disciplines involved. This first volume brings together papers exhibiting a wide range of system-theoretic techniques and applications to economic problems. The papers have been divided into two groups, following roughly--but not necessarily--the above classification into the construction and application stages of economic modelling. The papers in the first group focus on the identification of dynamic and static systems, while the papers in the second group address dynamic optimization problems.