The DSGE models are influential up until somebody comes up with a valid alternative, at which point they will be dropped at somewhat over the speed of light :)<p>To be brutally honest, this is not a big achievement. You should be able to rapidly speed up any matlab model by porting it into pretty much any other language due to well known issues with matlab. Being able to run DSGE models more quickly is important to economists because it allows them to be better &#x27;callibrated&#x27; - which is to say that the economists essentially tweak the models for the country they are looking at, until they fit the known data over an acceptable time period. (They don&#x27;t try to hide this btw. there are scores of papers on model calibration approaches.)<p>A good example of what this leads to is the one for Iceland:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sedlabanki.is&#x2F;lisalib&#x2F;getfile.aspx?itemid=8077" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sedlabanki.is&#x2F;lisalib&#x2F;getfile.aspx?itemid=8077</a><p>Notice that this is published in 2010, but for some strange reason the charts (p57 onwards) all stop in 2005.<p>It&#x27;s over fitting to the curve on computer assisted steroids.