Saturday, July 21, 2012

Mathias Vernengo — Stock-Flow with Consistent Accounting (SFCA) models

Gennaro Zezza, student and co-author of the late Wynne Godley and currently responsible for the Levy Institute macroeconomic model, gave an interesting talk on the usefulness of Stock-Flow with Consistent Accounting (SFCA) approach to macroeconomic modeling. He refers to the models as stock-flow consistent (SFC), but I prefer to emphasize that the consistency is not just about the relation between stocks and flows, but also the fact that these models provide the full set of accounts (website for those interested in this approach here).
SFCA proved to be considerably more successful than conventional, in particular Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models, in predicting the Great Recession (see here paper by Dirk Bezemer).
Read the rest at Naked Keynesianism
Stock-Flow with Consistent Accounting (SFCA) models
by Mathias Vernengo | Associate Professor, University of Utah
(h/t Clonal in the comments)

Must-read.

1 comment:

paul meli said...

"in the economy – and therefore in models representing the economy - everything comes from somewhere and goes somewhere else: 'there are no black holes.' This obvious principle has relevant implications: one is that the debt of somebody is a credit for somebody else."

We've seen this somewhere before…