The Empirical Validation of an Agent-based Model

The aim of this paper is to empirically validate the agent-based macroeconomic model of Gaffeo et al. [2008]. We show that the microsimulated version of the model is able to replicate actual data with a satisfactory degree of precision. From a theoretical point of view, our validation approach is made up of three different steps: a calibrated microsimulation of the model with actual data, an ex-post descriptive validation of the results, and a simple calibration exercise to ameliorate the goodness-of-fit of the model. The validation procedure of this paper has been performed using Italian data.

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