1.4. Setting up your RISE environment

1.4.1. Requirements

MATLAB R2023b or newer (required). RISE uses the dictionary / configureDictionary data type, which was introduced in R2023b. rise_startup checks the running release and stops with an error on anything older.

A LaTeX distribution (optional, recommended). RISE’s reporting system can produce PDF reports, and the documentation is built with LaTeX. If you want those features, install a TeX distribution and make sure pdflatex is on your system PATH:

If pdflatex cannot be found, RISE still works – only PDF reporting is disabled, and the start-up banner says so.

MATLAB toolboxes (recommended). The Optimization Toolbox and the Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox are used by RISE’s estimation, optimization and sampling routines. rise_startup reports which of them it finds. RISE will load without them, but some features will be unavailable.

1.4.2. Obtaining RISE

This edition of RISE is proprietary software: it is distributed in compiled (p-coded) form, personally by the author – for example to participants in the author’s courses and to colleagues and personal contacts. There is no public download, and it may not be redistributed. The full terms are on the RISE Toolbox License page, and are also shipped with the toolbox as LICENSE.txt.

You will receive RISE as an archive (a .zip file or a folder). Unpack it to a directory of your choice – there is nothing to compile or “install” in the operating-system sense. A typical location:

  • Windows: C:\Users\<you>\Documents\MATLAB\RISE_Tbx_Beta

  • macOS / Linux: ~/MATLAB/RISE_Tbx_Beta

1.4.3. Loading RISE

RISE is loaded from within MATLAB. Add the toolbox’s root folder (the one that contains rise_startup.m and the +rise package) to the MATLAB path, then run rise_startup:

addpath('C:\Users\<you>\Documents\MATLAB\RISE_Tbx_Beta')
rise_startup

rise_startup adds the rest of the toolbox to the path and prints a banner summarising what it found (your MATLAB version, the optional toolboxes, the LaTeX status, and where the PDF manual lives).

Useful variants:

rise_startup quiet     % load RISE, print only a one-line confirmation
rise_startup(true)     % unload RISE (remove its folders from the path)

To have RISE available in every MATLAB session, put the two lines above in your startup.m file (see doc startup in MATLAB), or use Set Path in MATLAB to save the toolbox root permanently and call rise_startup yourself when you need RISE.

Note

Only add the toolbox root folder to the path yourself. Do not add its sub-folders manually – rise_startup does that, and adding them by hand can shadow the wrong files.

1.4.4. Testing your installation

Once rise_startup has run, check that everything is working:

rise.demo

This creates, solves and inspects a small DSGE model and reports each step. For a tour of what RISE can do, the toolbox ships runnable examples under examples/ – each sub-folder has a howto.m script you can step through, for instance examples/MarkovSwitching/SmetsWouters/howto.m.

To open the PDF manual from MATLAB:

rise.doc

1.4.5. Updating RISE

New features are added, performance is improved, and reported bugs are fixed, so it is worth keeping your copy current. To update, obtain a fresh archive from the author and replace your existing copy with it (or unpack it to a new folder and point the MATLAB path at that). Then start a new MATLAB session and run rise_startup again.

1.4.6. The work environment

A RISE DSGE model is described in a model file whose name ends in .rs, .rz or .dsge. Everything else – solving, estimating, forecasting, plotting, reporting – is done from within MATLAB. The other model classes (VAR, SVAR, panel VAR, proxy SVAR, …) are driven entirely from MATLAB, with no separate model file.