Economics

The Department of Economics supports the CS&E Initiative but is not in a position of directly participating in it now. Although Economics is a quantitative discipline it has traditionally been more a user of CS&E technology rather than a generator. Notable exceptions where Economics has actually been a generator are: (i) general equilibrium models of the economy where systems of equations are solved using an algorithm proposed by Scarf, an economist, in the 1960s; (ii) some techniques for macro-economic models of the economy; and (iii) computationally intensive methods for nonlinear regression, notably the recently proposed method of simulated moments (McFadden, Packes, and Pollard, 1989) and indirect inference (Gourieroux, Monfort, Gallant, and Tauchen in the 1990s). The most likely area where a new hire might have interest in the CS&E Initiative is in econometrics but even there, there is only a small chance that the person would be interested. Most hiring in economics departments is directed to areas of economic interest rather than to specific tools. The development plan of the Economics Department at Davis does not involve fields which would require especially sophisticated computational techniques. Future CS&E faculty will have little overlap with current Economics faculty, and it is not likely that the situation will change with future recruitment. In particular, since no economics department concentrates on producing CS&E types, no Target-of-Excellence candidates come to mind. If the Department hired someone of interest to CS&E it would be by coincidence. We are sorry not to have any resources to offer CS&E hires. The Economics Department, like other Division of Social Science departments, has insufficient office space and resources for its own faculty. We hope that the CS&E Initiative will be of interest to other departments, more dependent on developing new computational techniques than Economics. It may well be that the future development of economic research will call one day for a fruitful interaction between CS&E and Economics, but at this point it is premature.