rodrigolece/econ-simulations

Analysis of games for economic development

This repository hosts a series of Jupyter notebooks to answer different research questions derived from the model presented in Ernst, Ekkehard. ‘The Evolution of Time Horizons for Economic Development’, 2004. [Ernst04] (DOI).

Most of the analysis and questions answered in the notebooks use the package kala. The instructions to install it can be found below.

The notebooks and the present repository, although initially thought as a first step for exploration, can be further developed to accompany a future publication as part of the open code policies of the journals.

Index

Each of the notebooks has as title the question that wants to answer.

1. How does the wealth of a group evolve with respect to the network structure?
2. What is the effect of memory and update rules when the network and the parameters are kept fixed?
3. How does the number of savers evolve with respect to different parameters?
4. How do different types of shocks with different magnitude affect the evolution of the game?

We also added two extra lists for reference:

• A list with some examples of networks that can be implemented into the simulations.
• A list of all the shocks we have implemented in kala and that can be used within the simulations.

Installation of kala

The package is written in Python (minimal version: 3.10). We recommend that the installation is made inside a virtual environment and to do this, one can use either conda (recommended in order to control the Python version) or the Python builtin venv (if the system's version of Python is compatible).

Create a virtual environment using Python's builtin venv

The first step is running

$ python -m venv kala

This creates a folder that contains the virtual environment kala (a different name can be used; change below as appropriate). We activate it using

$ source kala/bin/activate

Using conda (recommended)

The tool conda, which comes bundled with Anaconda has the advantage that it lets us specify the version of Python that we want to use. Python>=3.10 is required.

A new environment can be created with

$ conda create -n kala python=3.10 -y

Like before, the environment's name can be anything else instead of kala (simply change the name below). We activate it using

$ conda activate kala

Local install of the package

Once we are working inside an active virtual environment, we install (the dependencies and) the package by running

[$ pip install -r requirements.txt]
$ pip install -e .