Two main changes: first is renaming of ‘steady state’ commands to ‘evaluate on agents distribution’, second is improved support for using (parallel) cpu without gpu.

The renaming means commands like:
EvalFnOnAgentDist_AggVars_Case1()
have replaced those which used to be called:
SSvalues_AggVars_Case1()

To avoid breaking existing codes the ‘steady state’ commands continue to exist, but I expect to delete them in about two years time, and they will no longer be maintained/improved. This change reflects that these commands have many uses and applications involving agent distributions that have nothing to do with stationary distributions, and that steady-state was itself a misleading (essentially incorrect) description of stationary distribution. The new naming better reflects their actual use. There has also been some internal improvements in how these commands function that help improve performance.

The improved support for cpus is entirely behind the scenes, and has been done in response to requests from users. While the cpus are slower a number of people appear to find them useful for creating slow-to-compute-but-easy-to-implement solutions to models which they can use to debug their own more sophisticated codes.

All the existing example codes have been updated to reflect the renaming.

To celebrate I have uploaded a replication: Castañeda, Díaz-Giménez & Ríos-Rull (2003) – Accounting for the US Earnings and Wealth Inequality. This model is a ‘Case 2’ problem.

As ever, if you find something that does not work, or there is a feature you think would really help improve the VFI Toolkit, please don’t hesitate to either send me an email or post on the forum.