About the project 

The project focuses on research in macroeconomic models relevant to policymaking describing uncertain decision making by banks, consumers, businesses and public institutions as well as the global systemic risk of the macro-financial system. Four lines of research are combined in the project:

• Behavioural models and heterogeneous agents;
• Modelling financial institutions, their vulnerability and the dynamics of systemic risk;
• Integration of these new models in macroeconomic policy models;
• Development of new policy instruments for managing financial contagion, bubbles and crashes and monetary and fiscal policy in times of crisis. 

The consortium is comprised of researchers in the field of behavioural economics and macroeconomics with extensive experience in constructing models and developing and testing macroeconomic monetary and fiscal policy models. 

CeNDEF

CeNDEF’s contribution will be the development of macroeconomic behaviour and complexity models with heterogeneous agents (for example heterogeneous expectations) and testing these models in macroeconomic laboratory experiments. The project is also closely linked with the UvA Economics & Business research priority area ‘Risk and Macro Finance’. 

CeNDEF appointed a postdoc researcher, Tomasz Makarewicz  for this project for a period of two years (November 2014-November 2016). Other CeNDEF researchers involved in the project are Cees Diks, Jan Tuinstra, Florian Wagener, Domenico Massaro and Isabelle Salle.