Examining "Macroeconometric Modeling by Ray C. Fair"

Proud Economy 0010

This looks like something that I wanted to learn back in the 1970's, but was unable to get into. I started programming in 1967 and worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco for a while. I became aware of their economists and econometric modeling, but I was in the wrong world to break into that field.

Professor Fair's information looks like he has been there and he has made his information available on the internet at "fairmodel.econ.yale.edu". Now I wonder if one could use his work to reconstruct something like his model from scratch and use that to learn about macroeconomics?

Reading Fair's "Reflections on Macroeconometric Modeling", July 2013, it sounds like he is talking about the right stuff, but I don't understand it enough to evaluate it at all. I would start with a naive approach, see how much of Fair's model I can understand and extract, and attempt to formulate an infrastructure to build my versions.

Starting with "The US Model Appendix A" sectors

• Households
• Firms
• Financial Institutions
• Foreign Entities
• Government

we can then sort out the variables (about 350) and equations (188 of them). The "The Fair-Parke Program" appears to contain the Fortran code and all of data that is used to run the models at "The US Model" and "The MCI Model".

More as I get to it

Gary Young (proudindiv)