researchI am trying to decide whether to enroll in courses offered in Simulation. But I am pursuing a PhD in Economics and want to take only those courses that will help me publish at a later date. The faculty in my department are not familiar with Simulation. Simulation courses are offered in the Computer Science department by faculty who are not familiar with Economics. So I was wondering if someone could suggest recent examples of Econ papers in standard journals that have used / applied simulation.
I think there's at least a couple different senses of the word. Simulation in econometrics is a technique for evaluating integrals where there's no closed form solution. See Kenneth Train's Discrete Choice Methods with Simulation book for this. Another type of simulation comes up in modeling behavior of complex dynamic systems. See Scott Page and John Miller's book on Complex Adaptive Systems for some micro, agent-based examples, like residential segregation. Again, simulation is useful because a closed form mathematical solution is hard or does not exist. My guess is what they teach in CS departments is more useful for the latter, and less useful for the econometric or macro purposes.
Are you doing simulation as part of your PhD?
If simulation is part of your PhD, then get yourself a subsidiary supervisor from the Computer Science department. Agent-based modelling gets used now and again, and Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo [MCMC] simulation is pretty common. Do a search of the economics literature with those as key phrases, to get thousands of examples.
But if simulation is not part of your PhD, then forget the course in simulation until after your PhD’s finished - you’ve got better things to be concentrating on than interesting but irrelevant courses.
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