Productive capacity utilization, economic growth and functional distribution of income in the presence of behavioral heterogeneities and patterns of interaction among agents

Abstract

This research proposal refers to an application for funding to cover expenses associated with a one-year visit (from August 01, 2019 to July 31, 2020) of Prof. Jaylson da Silveira to the Department of Economics at FEA-USP to participate in research activities in close collaboration with me. Given the considerable affinity and synergy existing between our research agendas, as testified by the excellent publication record of our joint work in well-ranked journals, such visit will greatly contribute academically by generating knowledge spillovers in several dimensions. As a testimony to his expressive contribution to academic research in economics, Prof. Jaylson is a recipient of a competitive CNPq scholarship (PQ, for productivity in research) for almost a decade. The three topics on which our joint work will focus during Prof. Jaylson's visit configure a natural and promising unfolding of our active and well-published research (both individually and in collaboration) in the last years, which provides several interesting and promising avenues for further research. These topics are: (i) macroeconomic impacts of nominal shocks in a pricing game played in networks with heterogeneity of strategies of information updating; (ii) output and inflation stabilization under heterogeneous expectations in demand-led macrodynamic models; and (iii) endogenous fluctuations of wage inequality and cycles in the presence of heterogeneity in strategies of wage formation. In fact, it usually happens in our joint work that in writing a paper which explores an idea or possibility which arose when we were working on a previous paper, often times we are glad to see other interesting avenues for follow-up research being opened up. The expected output of our collaboration during Prof. Jaylson's visit is at least three coauthored papers for submission to well-ranked international journals. Each of these papers will develop a macrodynamic model with sound evolutionary microfoundations to be solved analytically and/or simulated computationally, which is a kind of methodology that we have always followed in our intensive and well-published research collaboration. Prof. Jaylson will also actively participate in advising meetings I regularly hold with graduate students whose research I supervise, given that some of them are (or will be) working on topics pertaining or related to the research agenda that Prof. Jaylson and I have been jointly pursuing for more than a decade. One of these students has just been granted a Fapesp scholarship to work on his thesis (2018/19267-0) and will be able to profitably interact with Prof. Jaylson on the development of the model to occupy one of the essays of his thesis. Prof. Jaylson will also interact academically with a doctoral student of mine who is currently working on a research proposal to be submitted to Fapesp to apply for funding. This dissertation will develop an agent-based model (an area of expertise of Prof. Jaylson and a topic in our joint research agenda) to explore the distributional impacts of monetary policy. Time coincidence permitting, Prof. Jaylson will also officially sit in the qualification committee of some of my graduate students during his visit. He will also be available to interact academically with other department graduate students and faculty working on or interested in his areas of research, or on other research issues of common interest. In addition, Prof. Jaylson will present preliminary results of our joint research in at least two department graduate seminars and will teach a short mini-course of two or three lectures in an elective graduate course on macrodynamics I have been regularly co-teaching in the academic semester running from March to June. In fact, as can be checked in the file "Programa Disciplina Macrodinâmica" uploaded to the area for "Other Documents" of the submission system, the syllabus for this graduate course includes part of my recent joint work with Prof. Jaylson. (AU)