I will discuss some examples of Mean Field Games (MFGs) that naturally arise in macroeconomics. These MFGs come from models designed to study some of the most important questions in economics, such as: Why has growth been so unequally distributed in many advanced economies? What causes infrequent but large economic crisis? How does the monetary transmission mechanism work? At the same time, these models are highly interesting for mathematicians because their structure is often quite difficult. My talk will mostly focus on macroeconomic models with heterogeneous individuals that are used to model the joint distribution of income and wealth, i.e. inequality, and its interaction with the macroeconomy. While these models are MFGs they typically do not satisfy the restrictions imposed in the mathematics MFG literature to obtain theoretical characterizations (in particular basic results like existence and uniqueness). The situation is even more difficult for variants of these models with common noise. Therefore, new approaches are needed to analyze this class of theories and my hope is to get academics with backgrounds in mathematics, statistics and operations research etc interested in studying them.

Speaker Bio

Benjamin Moll is a Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton. Moll’s research addresses questions in macroeconomics and development economics. He has investigated the importance of credit market imperfections in explaining cross-country income differences, the role of policy in alleviating them, the determinants of cross-country differences in human capital accumulation and the role of knowledge diffusion in the growth process. Moll’s current research explores the role of income and wealth distribution in the macroeconomy. One line of this work is concerned with the causes of inequality, in particular understanding what drove the rise in income and wealth inequality observed in the U.S. over the past forty years. A second line of this work is concerned with the consequences of inequality for macroeconomic performance.

Moll received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 2010.