A Note: If Matlab reports error as "too many inputs" for ValueFnIter_Case#, oftentimes deleting the first input V0 can work

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Hi potential learners like me,

This case appears in my experience of running HopenhaynRogerson1993 on Oct 10, 2020, after I download the toolkit and replication folders at Github at https://github.com/vfitoolkit/VFIToolkit-matlab and https://github.com/vfitoolkit/vfitoolkit-matlab-replication.

A Note: If Matlab reports the error as “too many inputs” for ValueFnIter_Case#, oftentimes deleting the first input V0 can work. This issue shall not be reported as a coding error in the forum since a little step can fix this issue.

In the end of this threat, I would like to express my deep gratitude towards Robert Kirkby for sharing this Toolkit. I am a Finance Ph.D. student at Arizona State University. I find this toolkit a wonderful learning package for replicating important macroeconomic papers. This resource is sacre and precious for me. And perhaps there is no better substitute publicly available.

Best Regards,
Bo Li

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Dear Bo,

thanks for pointing this out for people. Is good to help them avoid having to figure out for themselves.

This is a ‘deliberate’ result of when the VFI toolkit was upgraded to version 1.5. I made it so that users no longer have to provide an inital guess of V0; although they still can using vfoptions.V0. This was also important to my being able to make it so that the toolkit can often now just check if you have a gpu (and cuda) and use this where it exists but otherwise just run on parallel cpus.

I updated all of the examples to work with version 1.5, but have not yet done so for all the replication codes. This is on my to-do list :smiley:

Glad to hear you find the toolkit useful. If you have any suggestions for improvements, or about which parts of it are hardest to learn/understand I would really appreciate hearing them. I want to make it easier for beginner users but I am not sure what changes or ‘teaching materials’ would help the most.

Yours Sincerely
Robert Kirkby

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Hi Robert,

thank you so much for such devotion to replicating important papers and making such files public. I believe many Ph.D. students benefit a lot from them, especially when they are beginners in this field. Many Ph.D. programs do not illustrate code in such details.

As for the suggestion, I guess making a short video of simplified examples would help advertise such a toolkit to most students since videos seem to be the most popular way to convey information in social media. And most importantly, the starting part is the hardest part of the learning path as well. Short videos on simplified examples might help smooth the entry in code learning for beginners.

Thank you again.

Best Regards,
Bo Li

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Thanks. Those are some helpful thoughts.