The Art of Temporal Approximation: An Investigation into Numerical Solutions to Discrete and Continuous-Time Problems in Economics
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
A recent literature within quantitative macroeconomics has advocated the use of continuous-time methods for dynamic programming problems. In this paper we explore the relative merits of continuous-time and discrete-time methods within the context of stationary and nonstationary income fluctuation problems. For stationary problems in two dimensions, the continuous-time approach is both more stable and typically faster than the discrete-time approach for any given level of accuracy. In contrast, for convex lifecycle problems (in which age or time enters explicitly), simply iterating backwards from the terminal date in discrete time is superior to any continuous-time algorithm. However, we also show that the continuous-time framework can easily incorporate nonconvexities and multiple controls—complications that often require either problem-specific ingenuity or nonlinear root-finding in the discrete-time context. In general, neither approach unequivocally dominates the other, making the choice of one over the other an art, rather than an exact science. Code can be found at https://github.com/tphelanECON/The Art of Temporal Approximation WP.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it