CONFERENCE PAPERS

The world is facing a major multifactorial crisis that requires us to effectively manage the interplay between economic development, energy supply, and climate and environmental change. The conventional models used to analyse climate policies and their effects typically treat the economy as static and perfectly efficient. However, given the complexity of these issues and the heterogeneity of agents involved, it is clear that such approaches may be inadequate. As such, this paper proposes an Agent-Based, Stock-Flow Consistent, Input-Output model that provides a more appropriate framework for analysing economic and environmental policies. The proposed model is a Multi-sectoral Micro-Macro Model for the Economy, Energy, and Emissions (M3E3). It combines unconventional modeling approaches and it also draws on a range of theoretical foundations, including Keynesian, Kaleckian, Schumpeterian, and Minskyan perspectives. The model is populated by a variety of heterogeneous agents, including firms, banks, and households, which interact in complex ways to create irreversible economic dynamics at the micro, sectoral, and macro levels. The firms are organized into four productive sectors, consumption, capital, inputs, and energy, in addition to a financial sector populated by the banks and income classes populated by the households. The model is modular and adaptable, allowing for it to be easily customized to specific scenarios. One of the key features of the model is its focus on the energy sector, which plays a central role in the transition to a low-carbon economy. The model is able to simulate the behaviour of the energy sector and its impact on the wider economy, taking into account the production of CO2 emissions. This paper presents initial formulations of the model and some initial stylized facts the model was able to reproduce, demonstrating its ability to deal with real-world phenomena.

Before the 2008 Crisis, monetary policy, via changes in the basic interest rate, was the main policy instrument to stabilize the economy. But such policies not only failed to generate adequate responses to the financial crisis but also could be accounted responsible for the increasing inequality. This result is not clear, however, if one remains bound to the traditional monetary policy theory and conventional models. So, in this paper, we build up an Agent-Based, Stock-Flow Consistent, Heterodox Disequilibrium Model to be able to analyse and evaluate the effects of different levels of basic interest rates, especially the distributive effects. Using computer simulations, we show that the basic interest rate has a key role when firms compete in oligopolistic markets and face financial constraints and costs. In such circumstances, increases in the interest rate can be responsible for price increases, creating the price puzzle problem. In addition, it forces redistribution of income in favour of the financial system and pressures the profit rate of industrial firms, which will raise prices and deteriorate the wage share. The final distributive effect between these three sources of income will ultimately depend on the power of these agents: the bargaining power of the workers to claim higher wages and the market power of the firms to raise prices.

​Bitcoin got increasing popularity and was considered by the public as a great investment due to huge overvaluation in 2017. In parallel, economists and high-level technicians started to advocate the use of bitcoin and other cryptographic currencies as an alternative to national currencies. Some authors even defend the cryptographic currency as a solution to an international monetary and payment system. However, bitcoin and other cryptographic currencies are far from being considered as money, so it is hard for a monetary and payment system to emerge based on these technologies. This paper, apart from briefly presenting the Bitcoin System, shows why bitcoin is not money in the light of the Keynesian theory. We use Keynesian essential properties of Money and Modern Money Theory to define money, and to show that cryptographic currencies are not money. We then go back to Keynes' theory of portfolio choice, established in Chapter 17 of the General Theory, to show what bitcoin really is: at most, bitcoin is a perfect virtual commodity, a virtual liquid speculative asset.

This paper presents a new simplified version of the Multisectoral Micro-Macro (MMM) model presented in Possas and Dweck (2004) and Dweck (2006). We use the minimum structural specification of the model, including a simplified version of the government and the external sector, as we focus on the core productive structure of the model. Those simplifications allowed us to implement an automatic generalized calibration and initialization mechanism. Under some hypotheses, we can calibrate and initialize any configuration based only on a small set of parameters, facilitating a sensitivity analysis. Those methodological procedures are necessary to reach two goals: to test under which parameter specifications the main general results hold and to turn the model more general, user friendly, and modular. We show that our simplified version is able to replicate the same general results as the consolidated version, with more statistical significance, using a MonteCarlo exercise with 100 runs. In preliminary tests, we address the relationship between technological change,effective demand, and endogenous growth. Finally, a Global Sensitivity Analysis shows that autonomous consumption is the most important element for GDP growth, confirming Kalecki (1941) hypothesis of a necessary demand compensation mechanism for technical change to impact economic growth. 

Based on the writings of Hyman Minsky, the inherent instability of capitalism stems from the endogenously increasing financial fragility. Individual firms, and consequently, the economy as a whole, assume more fragile financial positions as rational behavior in the face of uncertainty, becoming more susceptible to interest rate variations. Ultimately, they can become insolvent and trigger a financial crisis. The goal of this paper is to analyze theoretically the role of the expectations and conventions in this process described above, as well as to incorporate the role of conventions in the formation of interest rates and monetary policy. The hypothesis is that, in a world where uncertainty can’t be eliminated, conventions are critical to the economic cycle. For this, a review of the concept of convention in the formation of expectation and decision making under uncertainty will be done, after a contextualization of the theoretical debate. Next, we will analyze how the conventions affect the economic cycle to Minsky and finally we extend the analysis of conventions for the formation of interest rates and for monetary policy, which also impact on the cycle. 

The use of the interest rate as the instrument of monetary policy is quite questionable, both in the empirical field and in the theoretical field. In the empirical field, much is discussed about the effectiveness of monetary policy, regarding the asymmetry of interest response to positive and negative shocks, and, more recently, the zero lower bound problem. In the theoretical field, few approaches discuss the negative side of using the interest rate as an instrument of monetary policy. One of these few approaches is the Minskyan view, which warns of the possibility of the interest rate affecting the financial stability of the economy. This paper aims to present the Minsky vision and to show, in the theoretical field, why the interest rate is not the best option of a monetary policy instrument. Finally, the alternatives are presented in this view.