Does cross-fertilization occur in recent macroeconomics? A quantitative exploration of the interactions between DSGE and MAB models

Abstract

The dominant approach to macroeconomics has always claimed its capacity to incorporate new ideas, continuously adapting its models in order to address contemporaneous challenges. This narrative leads to present academic macroeconomics research as driven by a continuous linear progress. 2008 and its trail of crises seems to have revealed more openly that such interactions, to consider that they may have existed, may no longer operate. Focusing on recent period, we propose to challenge this narrative, investigating whether such interactions still exist today and questioning their nature. We established a set of 2299 articles composed by Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models and Macro Agent-Based Models (MABM). We investigate the structure of the social communities authoring these articles and their intellectual interactions in view of establishing their relative fragmentation or strong scientific unity. Bibliographic coupling reveals that DSGE and MABM literatures refer to two different sets of bibliographic references. We also pay attention to two communities known to be interstitial: HANKs and hybrid models. While the overall results exhibit a relative fragmentation of these communities, they do not provide evidence of collaboration between MABM and DSGE authors. Rather, results suggest a completely dissymmetric influence from DSGE on the MABM literature