ASA-EM researcher participated in the 28th International Conference on Computing in Economics and Finance

The 28th International Conference on Computing in Economics and Finance was organized by the Society for Computational Economics, which promotes computational methods in economics and finance. The annual scientific conference focused on computational economics and was held in Dallas, Texas from June 17 through June 19, 2022.

The Conference on Computing in Economics and Finance explores the intersection of economics and computation. These areas include agent-based computational modeling, computational econometrics, and statistics, computational finance, computational modeling of dynamic macroeconomic systems, computational tools for the design of automated Internet markets, programming tools specifically designed for computational economics, and pedagogical tools for the teaching of computational economics. Some of these areas are unique to computational economics, while others extend traditional areas of economics to new areas through computational techniques.

The talk focused on the Bank of Canada’s next-generation economic modeling effort with CANVAS, a Canadian behavioral agent-based model (ABM). Economic models are essential to the policy-making process at the Bank of Canada. The current suite of models faces challenges in incorporating high levels of household and firm-level heterogeneity, strategic behaviors, and network effects. We develop CANVAS, a Canadian behavioral agent-based model, in contribution to the Bank’s next-generation modeling effort. CANVAS has improved forecasting performance and supported Bank staff’s analysis of the macroeconomic implications of the COVID-19 pandemic and recovery.