Microdata Methods and Practice

supported by the EU 6th Research Framework and Marie Curie Research Training Actions

Meetings

The Network plans seven conferences that will allow trainees to present their work and interact with senior researchers in formulating further research plans. The meetings also allow the scientific committee to monitor the progress of the various teams in meeting their goals and the quality of their interaction in the training programme and in promoting the main themes of the network. Meetings will also be used in order to involve researchers from outside the Network in the workings of the group, bringing in fresh ideas and helping to recruit young researchers.

Numerical dynamic programming for policy analysis and estimation

Dynamic programming is the mathematical foundation for economic analysis of dynamic problems. This masterclass describes the latest developments in computational methods for solving large, complex dynamic programming problems. This includes value function iteration methods for life-cycle models and simultaneous equation methods for infinite-horizon problems that use new approaches to value function approximation to achieve both numerical stability and high accuracy. For example, we will solve finite-horizon life-cycle models including labor supply, consumption decisions, and dynamic asset allocation of six stocks, one bond, and proportional transaction costs for stock transactions.

We illustrate these methods by computing responses to alternative tax policies and showing how to incorporate these methods in structural estimation methods, such as maximum likelihood and method of moments estimators. We will discuss various implementations of these methods on distributed and parallel computing environments, often achieving 95% efficiency when using hundreds of processors.

Speakers