Abstract
This paper presents a numerical procedure to estimate a stochastic growth model of real business cycle type where the decision rules are not analytically solvable. The statistical estimation of this type of models faces the difficulty that the relationship is not explicit between the estimated parameters and the objective function for the estimation (for example, the distance function in GMM estimation). Furthermore, multiple local optima may exist since the objective function is often nonlinear in parameters. To circumvent these problems, we introduce a global optimization algorithm, the simulated annealing, that searches the parameter space recursively for the global optimum. When this algorithm is employed, along with an appropriate approximation method of dynamic programming to numerically compute the decision rules, the estimation turns out to be efficient. The estimation of structural parameters with statistical methods appears to us a necessary step to empirically evaluate RBC models.
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Semmler, W., Gong, G. (1997). A Numerical Procedure to Estimate Real Business Cycle Models Using Simulated Annealing. In: Amman, H., Rustem, B., Whinston, A. (eds) Computational Approaches to Economic Problems. Advances in Computational Economics, vol 6. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-2644-2_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-2644-2_21
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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