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Ensuring the Validity of the Micro Foundation in DSGE Models

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  • Martin Møller Andreasen

    (School of Economics and Management, University of Aarhus, Denmark and CREATES)

Abstract

The presence of i) stochastic trends, ii) deterministic trends, and/or iii) stochastic volatility in DSGE models may imply that the agents' objective functions attain infinite values. We say that such models do not have a valid micro foundation. The paper derives sufficient conditions which ensure that the objective functions of the households and the firms are finite even when various trends and stochastic volatility are included in a standard DSGE model. Based on these conditions we test the validity of the micro foundation in six DSGE models from the literature. The models of Justiniano & Primiceri (American Economic Review, forth-coming) and Fernández-Villaverde & Rubio-Ramírez (Review of Economic Studies, 2007) do not satisfy these sufficient conditions, or any other known set of conditions ensuring finite values for the objective functions. Thus, the validity of the micro foundation in these models remains to be established.

Suggested Citation

  • Martin Møller Andreasen, 2008. "Ensuring the Validity of the Micro Foundation in DSGE Models," CREATES Research Papers 2008-26, Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University.
    • Handle: RePEc:aah:create:2008-26
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    Cited by:

    1. Martin Andreasen, 2010. "How to Maximize the Likelihood Function for a DSGE Model," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 35(2), pages 127-154, February.
    2. Martin Møller Andreasen, 2008. "Non-linear DSGE Models, The Central Difference Kalman Filter, and The Mean Shifted Particle Filter," CREATES Research Papers 2008-33, Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University.
    3. Martin Møller Andreasen, 2008. "Explaining Macroeconomic and Term Structure Dynamics Jointly in a Non-linear DSGE Model," CREATES Research Papers 2008-43, Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Deterministic trends; DSGE models; Error distributions; Moment generating functions; Stochastic trends; Stochastic volatility; Unit-roots;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E10 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General Aggregative Models - - - General
    • E30 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - General (includes Measurement and Data)

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