Agent-based Macroeconomics: The Schumpeter Meeting Keynes Models

This Element is about agent-based macroeconomics in general, and in particular about a family of evolutionary, agent-based models (ABMs), which are called 'Schumpeter meeting Keynes' (or K+S). The K+S models knit together 'Schumpeterian' endogenous processes of innovation with 'Keynesian' mechanisms of demand generation. As with all well-constructed ABMs, the K+S models are populated by a multiplicity of agents which interact on the grounds of quite simple, empirically based, behavioural rules, whose collective outcomes are 'emergent properties' which cannot be imputed to the intention of any single agent. After the K+S model is empirically validated, the impacts of different combinations of innovation, industrial, fiscal, and monetary policies for different labour-market regimes and inequality scenarios are assessed. The Element offers a new perspective on macroeconomics considering the economy as a complex evolving system.