Macroprudential Policy in a Heterogeneous Environment—An Application of Agent-Based Approach in Systemic Risk Modelling

Assessment of welfare effects of macroprudential policy seems the most important application of the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) framework of macro-modelling. In particular, the DSGE-3D model, with three layers of default (3D), was developed and used by the European Systemic Risk Board and European Central Bank as a reference tool to formally model the financial cycle as well as to analyze effects of macroprudential policies. Despite the extreme importance of incorporating financial constraints in Real Business Cycle (RBC) models, the resulting DSGE-3D construct still embraces the representative agent idea, making serious analyses of diversity of economic entities impossible. In this paper, we present an alternative to DSGE modelling that seriously departs from the assumption of the representativeness of agents. Within an Agent Based Modelling (ABM) framework, we build an environment suitable for performing counterfactual simulations of the impact of macroprudential policy on the economy, financial system and society. We contribute to the existing literature by presenting an ABM model with broad insight into heterogeneity of agents. We show the stabilizing effects of macroprudential policies in the case of economic or financial distress.