ETACE ACE-COVID19
Version: July 2020
This is the source code of the ace_covid19 model. The economic part is partly based on the EURACE@Unibi model, a large-scale agent-based macroeconomic model. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, we implement social interactions among agents to model the spread of the COVID-19 disease. This allows us to analyze the effect of the different lockdown policies and reopening strategies on economic variables like GDP, public expenditures, bankruptcies or unemployment rates, as well as epidemiological effects (number of infected individuals, casualties) in an integrated model.
Getting Started
These instructions will allow you to run the model on your system.
System Requirements and Installation
To run the code you need to install Julia (v1.4.1). Additionally, the following packages need to be installed:
- Agents - Version 3.2.1
- Plots - Version 1.5.2
- DataFrames - Version 0.21.4
- HypothesisTests - Version 0.10.0
- ProgressMeter - Version 1.3.1
- StatsPlots - Version 0.14.6
- LaTeXStrings - Version 1.1.0
In order to install a package, start julia and execute the following command:
using Pkg; Pkg.add("ProgressMeter")
A typical installation on desktop computer takes about 15 minutes. The code has been tested on Microsoft Windows 10, Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS and macOS Catalina 10.15.5.
Running The Model
The model is implemented in covid_model.jl. In covid_par_ini.jl, the initial values and parameters are set. The simulation can be started from a snapshot. This needs to be specified in the covid_par_ini.jl-file. A snapshot with 100.000 household agents can be found in the root folder (snapshot100kr1.dat).
The user can specify a set of policies that will be activated at certain point in time during the simulation. The policies have to be implemented in specific policy-files and added to covid_par_ini.jl.
To run one simulation, use the command
julia covid_main.jl
A typical run on a normal desktop computer takes about 30 minutes.
To conduct different experiments and execute several runs of the model (batches) in parallel, setup your covid_par_ini.jl-files in a dedicated experiment folders and run
julia -p <no_cpus> covid_run_exp.jl <folder> <no_batches>
to execute a certain experiment. The simulation data of all runs will be stored in batchdata.dat. For an example on how to create plots from this file, see covid_plot_exp.jl.
Replication
All covid_par_ini.jl and batchdata.dat files used to create the figures and tables in the paper can be found in the data folder.
We use the following files located in the root folder to encode different policies:
- policy_baseline.jl - The baseline lockdown policy.
- policy_baseline_end.jl - Baseline policy after lockdown.
- policy_baseline_end_xi0.5.jl - Baseline policy after lockdown with higher infection probability
- policy_bailout.jl - lockdown policy including bailout schemes.
- policy_alpha.jl - Lockdown policy with more or less severe restrictions on economic activity (alpha parameter).
- policy_bailout_alpha.jl - Lockdown policy with more or less severe restrictions on economic activity (alpha parameter) and bailout schemes.
- policy_good_xi0.5.jl - Policy after lockdown with partial economic restrictions and higher infection probability.
- policy_only_xi - Lockdown policy implementing individual preventive measures only.
- policy_only_xi_ho - Lockdown policy implementing individual preventive measures and working at home only
- policy_allout.jl - Policy after vaccine becomes available (terminates all measures).
Data Creation
To reproduce the results from the paper by re-simulating the model use the folder structure and covid_par_ini.jl files in the data folder. The covid_par_ini.jl file for e.g. the baseline (threshold=5, alpha=1.0, xi=0.6) is located in the data/main/xi06/beta5/alpha1 folder. In order to create a batch of 20 runs, execute
julia -p <no_cpus> covid_run_exp.jl data/main/xi06/beta5/alpha1/ 20
from the root folder. The simulation results will be stored in data/main/xi06/beta5/batchdata.dat.
Plotting
The plotting files are located in the plot_files folder. To plot all figures, use the command
julia covid_plot.jl
Figures are stored in the figures folder. Data is taken from the folder data.
Statistical Testing
The file to perform the statistical tests is located in the stat_tests folder. Use the command
julia stat_test_and_data.jl
to create a text file called stat_tests_results.txt, which contains the results of all statistical tests.
Empirical Data
We make use of empirical data from the Johns Hopkins University for the number of infected and the number of casualties. The number of infected and the number of casualties has been adjusted by the detection rate and has been scaled to a population of 100.000. R0 is calculated from this data following Robert Koch Institut's methodology which is available in all the daily reports. The adjusted data is stored in data/baseline_GER/emp_traj_100.jl.
Authors
Alessandro Basurto, Herbert Dawid, Philipp Harting, Jasper Hepp, Dirk Kohlweyer
Further Links
- ETACE - Chair for Economic Theory and Computational Economics
- EURACE@Unibi - description of the EURACE@Unibi model
- Dawid et al 2019 - Dawid, H., Harting, P., van der Hoog, S., & Neugart, M. (2019). Macroeconomics with heterogeneous agent models: Fostering transparency, reproducibility and replication. Journal of Evolutionary Economics.
License
This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.