For Immediate Release: July 11, 1996
New Haven, CT - The Internet inaugurates a powerful new Web site tomorrow: FAIRMODEL. This site will allow business forecasters, policy makers, and economics students to forecast the future, and, at the touch of a computer key, calculate the effects on the economy of variables like tax and interest rates. Developed by Yale Professor of Economics Ray C. Fair, FAIRMODEL involves 131 interrelated equations that, taken together, approximate how the economy works.
FAIRMODEL is a new tool for the Web, allowing users to make changes, solve the model, examine their results and make further changes, without ever downloading anything to a personal computer. All the number crunching is done by the Web server. When large scale econometric models were first developed in the 1960s, they required mainframe computers. In 1983, Professor Fair pioneered the use of models on personal computers. Now he is the first to create a way to do the entire process on the Web, demonstrating that the Internet can be used for large computational problems. The site is free to all users.
Any or all of the data can be downloaded, printed, saved and shared with other users. In addition, the site has a message center for comments about the model and the economy. The Web site, programmed by Professor Fair and 47 Jane Internet Studio, is at http://fairmodel.econ.yale.edu.