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by grayclhn 3851 days ago
No. A central bank moving at all to Julia is absolutely fucking huge.
2 comments

Agreed. I worked on the FRBNY research floor, this model has real mindshare with policy makers, porting it is a huge investment in the language. They may be training scads of RAs in writing and using Julia, many of them will go off and do PhDs later.
This also provides a lot of justification/support for those of us who'd much rather teach (say) macroeconometrics in julia instead of matlab.
I suppose it depends on whether you think it's important for the popularity of Julia (something I don't care much about, since it's just a programming language) or because you think open science and policymaking is important (which I do).

[I see you're from Iowa State. I'm posting this from the house I bought from John Crespi a few months ago.]

Small world, his office is the floor below mine :)

I think we probably agree then --- but this announcement isn't exactly a sea change in open science and policymaking. This model (or one very close to it) has been available on various people's webpages for a while [1], the research on estimating and using DGSE models for forecasting and policy-making has been well documented and openly discussed, etc. And the NY Fed has put out a lot of "accessible" information about features of the model and interpretations of its results.

[1]: http://sites.sas.upenn.edu/schorf/pages/working-papers