Agent-Based Macroeconomics and Classical Political Economy: Some Italian Roots

In this work, we discuss how the rich academic milieu left by different Italian political economy traditions after WWII paved the way for the development of a new generation of macroeconomic agent-based models. The K + S (Dosi et al. in J Econ Dyn Control 34:1748–1767, 2010; Dosi et al. in J Evol Econ. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-016-0466-4, 2016a), CATS (Delli Gatti et al. in J Econ Behav Organ 56:489–512, 2005; Delli Gatti et al. in Macroeconomics from the bottom-up. Springer, Berlin, 2011) and EURACE (Cincotti et al. in Econ Open Access Open Assess E J 4, 2010; Teglio et al. in Adv Complex Syst 15:1–27, 2012) families of agent-based models are at the frontier of an alternative macroeconomic research paradigm, which considers the economy as a complex evolving system. The three families of models are presented in detail and their empirical performance and policy exercises discussed.