Salem Policy Seminar: Monday October 5th, 12-1:30pm
Climate Change Policy Analysis: An Example of how Supercomputing can Solve “Intractable” Economic Models
Models that analyze climate change policies are necessarily complex because they need to include elements of both the climate and economic systems. The result is that the literature is full of papers that investigate a few features of an integrated system, justifying unrealistic simplifications by asserting that doing more “is intractable”. I will describe the DSICE framework which takes basic deterministic models developed by Nordhaus and adds elements of economic and climate uncertainty. I will illustrate applications to the social cost of carbon, how direct capture of CO2 could affect policy, and implications for scenarios of global warming.
Policy@McCombs: Monday October 5th, 4-5:30pm
When Will the Fed Join the Third Millennium?
The U.S. Government and most businesses use powerful computing tools, but the Federal Reserve stands out as one government agency that has rejected modern computational tools. It is easy to document this description, but difficult to find good reasons for these gaps. This raises questions about the ability of a laptop-based Fed to regulate financial institutions that use supercomputers to decide how to respond to Fed regulations. I will describe the gap between computational science and computation in economics, and efforts to close it.