International Workshop on Empirical Stock-Flow Consistent Modelling

Since the Global Financial Crisis that broke out in 2008 there has been an increased interest in stock-flow consistent (SFC) models as a tool for understanding macroeconomic dynamics and undertaking prospective analyses. Their coherent integration of real and financial variables combined with their greater emphasis on realism compared to the models used at the time gave them an unprecedented level of attraction. In the last years official institutions at the national and the international level have developed new full-fledged SFC macroeconomic models (Burgess et al. 2016, Barbieri Hermitte et al. 2023, Godin and Yilmaz, 2020), while many of those who have not yet done so are trying to incorporate stock-flow consistency into their analyses. At the academic level, there is a growing number of books and articles based on the SFC approach, and an increasing number of Master’s and Ph.D. students engaged in expanding the applications of this powerful methodology.

The community of researchers working on empirical SFC models is quite strong, as many of its members were disciples of the pioneers and, in the case of the younger scholars, many pursued their studies contemporaneously and regularly met at different international conferences. Despite the growing number of researchers within this field, the fact that each of us is working in a different place does not leave too much room to share our work and, most importantly, the details of our methodologies, with the depth that would be needed to foster a collective learning process. When possible, joint work is done. But given the large investment that building an empirical SFC model requires and considering that each researcher is mostly interested in developing a model for their own country, it ends up happening that within the community there is a general idea of who is doing what, but we all feel that we would like to know more about how. Sharing our knowledge of the technical details of our work and explaining why certain criteria are followed at the expense of others is particularly important for Master’s and Ph.D. students, as well as young scholars, who are taking their first steps.

To strengthen our ties and establish a more fluid dialogue between our work we recently organized a special session on empirical SFC models at the 26th FMM Conference in Berlin (the FMM conference is one of the leading events in heterodox economics worldwide). Four groups of researchers including ourselves presented their work, while others attended and provided their critical analysis of the results shown. Although everyone was satisfied with the special session, there was a shared impression that the two hours allocated to it were insufficient to harness the fact that we were all together.
Hence, we propose to organize a 2-day workshop/conference where each working group has 45 minutes to present their work in detail (instead of the maximum 20 minutes that characterizes conferences), while one discussant who previously read the presented work provides comments for 10 minutes (this is something that hardly happens in conferences). In addition to the sharing of knowledge and the valuable feedback during the workshop, it is our ambition to summarize the experiences in working with empirical models in an article that can be a great inspiration for people who want to work in this field.

During the workshop, we plan to have a special session co-organized with YSI for PhD students and young scholars working on empirical SFC models. The PhD students will have a chance to present their current work on empirical SFC-models in front of experts within this field. Furthermore, we believe that it will be especially useful for them to also share a few days with well-established scholars in the field. This will allow the PhD students to connect with each other and more experienced researchers working on empirical SFC-modeling and hopefully lead to collaborations in the future.