Economic Complexity Chaos Sunspots Bubbles And Nonlinearity

The contents of this volume comprise the proceedings of the International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics conference held in 1987 at the IC^T2 (Innovation, Creativity, and Capital) Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. The essays present fundamental new research on the analysis of complicated outcomes in relatively simple macroeconomic models. The book covers econometric modelling and time series analysis techniques in five parts. Part I focuses on sunspot equilibria, the study of uncertainty generated by nonstochastic economic models. Part II examines the more traditional examples of deterministic chaos: bubbles, instability, and hyperinflation. Part III contains the most current literature dealing with empirical tests for chaos and strange attractors. Part IV deals with chaos and informational complexity. Part V, Nonlinear Econometric Modelling, includes tests for and applications of nonlinearity.

What do economic chaos and uncertainties mean in rational or irrational economic theories? How do simple deterministic interactions among a few variables lead to unpredictable complex phenomena? Why is complexity of economies causing so many conflicts and confusions worldwide?This book provides a comprehensive introduction to recent developments of complexity theory in economics. It presents different models based on well-accepted economic mechanisms such as the Solow model, Ramsey model, and Lucas model. It is focused on presenting complex behaviors, such as business cycles, aperiodic motion, bifurcations, catastrophes, chaos, and hidden attractors, in basic economic models with nonlinear behavior. It shows how complex nonlinear phenomena are identified from various economic mechanisms and theories. These models demonstrate that the traditional or dominant economic views on evolution of, for instance, capitalism market, free competition, or Keynesian economics, are not generally valid. Markets are unpredictable and nobody knows with certainty the consequences of policies or other external factors in economic systems with simple interactions.

This volume constitutes the Proceedings of the "Nonlinear Dynamics in Economics and Social Sciences" Meeting held at the Certosa di Pontignano, Siena, on May 27-30, 1991. The Meeting was organized by the National Group "Modelli Nonlineari in Economia e Dinamiche Complesse" of the Italian Ministery of University and SCientific Research, M.U.RS.T. The aim of the Conference, which followed a previous analogous initiative taking place in the very same Certosa, on January 1988*, was the one of offering a come together opportunity to economists interested in a new mathematical approach to the modelling of economical processes, through the use of more advanced analytical techniques, and mathematicians acting in the field of global dynamical systems theory and applications. A basiC underlying idea drove the organizers: the necessity of fOCUSing on the use that recent methods and results, as those commonly referred to the overpopularized label of "Chaotic Dynamics", did find in the social sciences domain; and thus to check their actual relevance in the research program of modelling economic phenomena, in order to individuate and stress promising perspectives, as well as to curb excessive hopes and criticize not infrequent cases where research reduces to mechanical, ad hoc, applications of "a la mode" techniques. In a word we felt the need of looking about the state of the arts in non-linear systems theory applications to economics and social processes: hence the title of the workshop and the volume.

This book presents the state-of-the-art in non-linear dynamics and sunspots. These two topics have been the core of an international conference on instability and public policies in a globalized world, organized at Aix-Marseille School of Economics and GREQAM in honor of Jean-Michel Grandmont. He has made significant contributions on general equilibrium theory, monetary theory, learning, aggregation, non-linear dynamics and sunspots. This book assembles contributions by Jean-Michel Grandmont's colleagues, students and friends that have been influenced by his works and that are at the frontier of research in this domain today.

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.

The compendium of papers in this volume focuses on aspects of economic uncertainty, financial instabilities and asset bubbles.Economic uncertainty is modeled in continuous time using the mathematical techniques of stochastic calculus. A detailed treatment of important topics is provided, including the existence and uniqueness of asymptotic economic growth, the modeling of inflation and interest rates, the decomposition of inflation and its volatility, and the extension of the quantity theory of money to allow for randomness.The reader is also introduced to the methods of chaotic dynamics, and this methodology is applied to asset pricing, the European equity markets, and the multi-fractality in foreign currency markets.Since the techniques of stochastic calculus and chaotic dynamics do not readily accommodate the presence of stochastic bubbles, several papers discuss in depth the presence of financial bubbles in asset prices, and econometric work is performed to link such bubbles to monetary policy.Finally, since bubbles often burst rather than deflate slowly, the last section of the book studies the crash of October 1987 as well as other crashes of national equity markets due to the Persian gulf crisis.

Gerald P. Dwyer, Jr. and R. W. Hafer The articles and commentaries included in this volume were presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis' thirteenth annual economic policy conference, held on October 21-22, 1988. The conference focused on the behavior of asset market prices, a topic of increasing interest to both the popular press and to academic journals as the bull market of the 1980s continued. The events that transpired during October, 1987, both in the United States and abroad, provide an informative setting to test alter native theories. In assembling the papers presented during this conference, we asked the authors to explore the issue of asset pricing and financial market behavior from several vantages. Was the crash evidence of the bursting of a speculative bubble? Do we know enough about the work ings of asset markets to hazard an intelligent guess why they dropped so dramatically in such a brief time? Do we know enough to propose regulatory changes that will prevent any such occurrence in the future, or do we want to even if we can? We think that the articles and commentaries contained in this volume provide significant insight to inform and to answer such questions. The article by Behzad Diba surveys existing theoretical and empirical research on rational bubbles in asset prices.