W. D. A. Bryant

General Equilibrium: Theory and Evidence

General Equilibrium Theory studies the properties and operation of free market economies. The field is a response to a series of questions originally outlined by Leon Walras about the operation of markets and posed by Frank Hahn in the following way: ‘Does the pursuit of private interest, through a system of interconnected deregulated markets, lead not to chaos but to coherence - and if so, how is that achieved?’ This is always an apt question, but particularly so given the ‘Global Financial Crisis’ that emerged from the operation of market economies in the Americas and Europe in mid to late 2008.The answer that General Equilibrium Theory provides to the Walras-Hahn question is that, under certain conditions coherence is possible, while under certain other conditions chaos, in various forms, is likely to prevail. The conditionality of either outcome is not always well understood - neither by proponents of, or antagonists to, the ‘free market position’. Consequently, this book attempts to show something of what General Equilibrium Theory has to say about the wisdom or otherwise of always relying on ‘market forces’ to manage complex socio-economic systems.

Non-nested tests of new classical versus Keynesian models: further evidence

This paper re-runs the experiment conducted by Dadkhah and Valbuena (1985), using data generated by the Australian, Canadian, Japanese, Swiss and Swedish economies. The aim of this exercise is to discriminate between new classical and Keynesian accounts of the business cycle. The results obtained in the present study are broadly supportive of Dadkhah and Valbuenas earlier findings in that the Keynesian model generally outperforms the new classical alternative.

Misinterpretations of the Second Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics: Barriers to Better Economic Education

Textbooks regularly interpret the second fundamental theorem of welfare economics by claiming it asserts that any desired Pareto optimum can be achieved by market prices.

Interest linkages between the US, UK and German interest rates: should the UK join the European Monetary Union?

In light of continuing mixed results in the literature, this paper re‐examines the German Dominance Hypothesis (GDH) and considers whether the UK should join the Eurozone. For this purpose, short‐term interest rate relationships between the UK, Germany, the Eurozone and the USA, for the period January 1982 to June 2007, are studied. The policy implication of a loss of monetary autonomy for the UK in favour of Germany or the European Central Bank (ECB) would give support to the UK joining the EMU as an economic response. From the early 1980s the Bundesbank’s responsibility was to use money growth targets to keep average inflation rate down in the long run. This long run objective suggests that an appropriate methodology for testing the GDH is to test whether the German stochastic trend is a driving stochastic trend. In other words we determine whether a permanent shock to the German interest rate has a permanent effect on the UK interest rate. To this end the structural shocks in a VECM are identified by imposing long‐run restrictions of the type developed in King et al. (1991). We apply the same techniques to testing whether the UK has suffered a loss of monetary autonomy in favour of the ECB.

OPTIMALITY OF EQUILIBRIUM

AbstractThe following sections are included:IntroductionThe first fundamental theorem of welfare economicsPreliminaries and definitionsThe First Welfare Theorem under ‘classical’ conditionsThe FWT under some non-classical conditionsAlternative preference conditionsIndivisible commoditiesMissing markets, externalities and public goodsBudget constraints that hold with equalitySummary on the FWTThe second fundamental theorem of welfare economicsThe SWT under ‘classical’ conditionsSome generalisations, extensions and limitations of the SWTInterdependent preferencesGeneral preference orderingsNon-convex production setsIncomplete marketsSome other extensions of, and limits to, the SWTSummary on the SWT‘Achieving’ a Pareto optimum versus ‘supporting’ a Pareto optimumConclusion

The Microeconomics of Choice under Risk and Uncertainty: Where Are We?

Financial decision-making is not straightforward, in part, because such decisions generally involve comparing financial assets the payoffs from which are subject to risk and uncertainty. Given that situation, two questions naturally arise: How do economic agents go about the business of making choices in the face of risk and uncertainty? And, how should economic agents make choices in the face of risk and uncertainty? This paper concentrates on the first of these questions and discusses some of the main attempts made by economic theory to understand how economic agents go about the business decision-making under conditions of risk and uncertainty. Theoretical possibilities considered in the context of decisions under conditions of risk include: Expected value maximization, Expected utility maximization, Rank dependent utility maximization, Prospect theory, and the Topology of fear approach to decision-making in the face of catastrophic risk. This paper also considers empirical tests of these theoretical possibilities and some of the anomalies and responses thrown up by those tests such as: Allais Paradox, Discovered Preference Hypothesis, and the choice behaviour of CEOs when faced with risk. The paper concludes with a brief excursion into choice under uncertainty where, unlike in risky choice situation, the existence of objective probabilities over states of the world cannot be relied on. In that context, the author briefly canvases the Subjective Expected Utility approach — which is unable in general to account for ambiguity aversion — Choquet utility, Walds Multiple Priors, and the Case Based approach This paper highlights the fact that the rich and fascinating field of decision-making under risk and uncertainty is characterized by a constant interplay between theoretical conjecture, empirical testing, and theoretical refinement. Such interplay is mirrored by this paper and contributions in the Colloquium Section of this Issue, where the thoughts of practitioners and academics interact.