Modeling Aggregate Behavior and Fluctuations in Economics

Masanao Aoki is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He also held professorial appointments at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Osaka University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the University of Illinois. Professor Aoki is a past President of the Society for Economic Dynamics and Control, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and a Fellow of the IEEE Control Systems Society. Currently Associate Editor of the journal Macroeconomic Dynamics published by Cambridge University Press, he also served as Editor of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control and the International Economic Review, and Associate Editor of the IEEE's Transaction of Automatic Control, Information Sciences, and the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Application. Professor Aoki is the author or editor of ten books, including New Approaches to Macroeconomic Modeling: Evolutionary Stochastic Dynamics, Multiple Equilibria, and Externalities as Field Effects (Cambridge, 1996).

1. Overview; 2. Setting up dynamic models; 3. The master equation; 4. Introductory simple and simplified models; 5. Aggregate dynamics and fluctuations of simple models; 6. Evaluation of alternatives; 7. Solving non-stationary master equations; 8. Growth and business cycle models; 9. Example: a new look at the diamond search model; 10. Interaction patterns of agents and distributions of cluster sizes; 11. Example: share markets with two dominant types of participants in a market.