A new firm-level model of corporate sector interactions and fragility: The Corporate Agent-Based (CAB) model

This paper develops a new large-scale firm-level simulation model, the Corporate Sector Agent-Based (CAB) Model, which is applied to analyse the COVID-19 shock and policy options in Barnes, Hillman, MacDonald and Wharf (2021). Agent-based models (ABMs) simulate the interaction of autonomous agents to generate emergent aggregate behaviours. The CAB model takes into account: heterogeneity across firms; a realistic customer-supplier network; interactions between firms; rule-of-thumb behaviour by firms and bankruptcy constraints.