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| Biographical sketches of instructor and guest lecturers
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Last update:
Address:
Bunche Hall 7271
Department of Economics
UCLA
Box 951477
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477
Contact Information:
Telephone: (310) 825-2360
Fax: (310) 825-9528
Dept. Phone: (310) 825-1011
Email: aoki@econ.ucla.edu
Fields:
Applied Macroeconomics.
Research:
New approach to macroeconomic modeling by means of jump Markov processes by specifying transition rates appropriately in the backward Chapman-Kolmogorov
(master equation); solutions of master equations to obtain aggregate dynamic equations, and fluctuations by solving the associated Fokker-Planck equations.
Modeling and analysis of multi-agent models to investigate such things as herding behavior and return dynamics, i.e., power-laws in share or stock markets;
Modeling and analysis of multiple country models by state space time series technique; aggregation of economy with heterogeneous agents by neural network methods;
adaptive learning algorithms.
Director of CRABE (Center for Research on Adaptive Behavior in Economics) received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1991.
She held a position at McGill University between 1991-1993 and since 1993 she has been at Simon Fraser University. In addition, she
has held a number of visiting positions at the universities and other institutions in US and Europe.
Her area of research interest has been focused on modeling learning in a variety of economic environments and testing different
behavioral assumptions by conducting experiments with human subjects. She has done a number of experiments in macroeconomic
environments, including models of the exchange rate and models that examine the role of various monetary rules. Two other areas
of her research are focused on developing models of adaptive behavior in repeated games and behavioral models for mechanism design
(provision of public goods, auctions, internet trading etc.) and testing them in the experiments with human subjects. Together with
colleagues from California Institute of Technology, she has recently initiated a Turing tournament, a method for evaluating models
of human behavior in social sciences (http://turing.ssel.caltech.edu). She is finishing a manuscript of a book whose emphasis is on
evolutionary models in macroeconomic environments.
Rob Axtell is a Fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution (Washington, D.C.) and co-founder of the Center on Social and Economic
Dynamics at Brookings (www.brookings.edu/dynamics). His Ph.D. is from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh) where he studied economics,
computer science, game theory and public policy.
His research focuses on modeling social systems using populations of software agents (also known as agent-based models or multi-agent systems).
He is co-author, with Joshua Epstein, of "Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up," published by MIT Press (www.brookings.edu/sugarscape).
A companion CD-ROM contains digital video of the so-called Sugarscape model. Accounts of this research have appeared widely in the popular press, as well
as on National Public Radio and the Discovery Channel On-Line.
His recent research utilizes agents to study economic exchange processes, equity issues (www.brookings.edu/dynamics/papers/classes),
the emergence of firms (www.brookings.edu/dynamics/papers/firms), the formation of cities, retirement dynamics (www.brookings.edu/dynamics/papers/retirement),
Anasazi archaeology, and the philosophy of emergence. A book tentatively titled "Artificial Agent Economies: The Multi-Agent Systems Approach to Positive
Economics," is planned for 2003. Additionally, he manages the development of Brookings Ascape software (www.brookings.edu/dynamics/models/ascape), a
pure Java framework for the rapid creation of agent-based models.
Current Position:
Academy Professor and Professor of Economics, University of Helsinki; since 1992
Past Positions (selected):
Professor of Economics, Turku School of Economics and Business Administration, 1987-91
Visiting Appointments:
Harvard University 1978-79,
Stanford University 1982-83
University of Oregon 1999
Honours and Offices:
Member of Academia Europaea
Member of Finnish Academy of Science and Letters
Fellow of the Econometric Society
Member of Executive Committee of Internaitonal Economic Association
Selected Publications:
Learning and Expectations in Macroeconomics, Princeton University Press 2001; with George W. Evans.
The Swedish Model under Stress: A View from the Stands, SNS Publications (both in Swedish and English), Stockholm 1997; with Thorvaldur Gylfason,
Torben Andersen, Arne Jon Isachsen and John Williamson.
Macroeconomic Modelling and Policy Implications, North-Holland, Amsterdam 1993, editor with Mikael Ingberg.
The State of Macroeconomics, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1990, editor.
Frontiers of Economics, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1985, editor with Kenneth J. Arrow.
Numerous articles in internaitonal and Finnish refereed journals and collected volumes.
Peter Howitt is Professor of Economics at Brown University. After receiving a PhD at Northwestern University under Bob Clower's supervision, he went
to the University of Western Ontario where he taught from 1972 to 1994.
He has written extensively on monetary economics, growth theory, Keynesian economics and the theory of unemployment. He and Clower are currently
writing a book on money, markets and firms. From 1995 to 2000 he taught at the Ohio State University and from 2000 he is Professor at Brown University, Rhode Island
Axel Stig Bengt Leijonhufvud was born in Sweden. He came to the United States in 1960 to do graduate work and obtained his Ph.D. from Northwestern University.
He taught at the University of California at Los Angeles from 1964 to 1994 and served repeatedly as Chairman of the Economics Department.
In 1991, he started the Center for Computable Economics at UCLA and remained its Director until 1997. In 1995 he was appointed
Professor of Monetary Theory and Policy at the University of Trento, Italy.
His research has particularly dealt with the limits to an economy's ability to coordinate activities as revealed by great depressions,
high inflations and (recently) transitions from socialist towards market economies.
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Department of Economics
via Inama, 5 I-38100 Trento tel. +39 461 282201
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