Discussion paper

DP19067 An Endogenous Gridpoint Method for Distributional Dynamics

Modeling continuous choices in heterogeneous agent models as "lotteries" over a discretized state space is standard practice (Young, 2010), but renders the distributional dynamics linear in optimal policies. We present a novel, simple method that captures nonlinearities and solves the distributional dynamics with interpolation instead of integration using the idea of an endogenous grid. Our approach solves for a stationary equilibrium as quickly as the lottery method for a given precision, outperforms it for linear dynamics, and accommodates nonlinear dynamics and aggregate risk. We demonstrate its efficacy by studying a model with aggregate investment risk with a third-order perturbation solution.

£6.00
Citation

Bayer, C, R Luetticke, M Weiß and Y Winkelmann (2024), ‘DP19067 An Endogenous Gridpoint Method for Distributional Dynamics‘, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 19067. CEPR Press, Paris & London. http://cepr.org/publications/dp19067