This and its companion volume, "The Economics of Imperfect Competition and Employment", are about Joan Robinson, her impact on modern economics, her challenges and critiques and the advances made in the science and art of economics.
This volume provides a unified framework for the analysis of short- and medium-run macroeconomics. It develops a core New Keynesian macro model based on imperfect competition and nominal rigidities and shows how this compares with alternatives.
In this book, Jean-Pascal Benassy attempts to integrate into a single unified framework dynamic macroeconomic models reflecting such diverse lines of thought as general equilibrium theory, imperfect competition, Keynesian theory, and rational expectations. He begins with a simple microeconomic synthesis of imperfect competition and nonclearing markets in general equilibrium under rational expectations. He then applies this framework to a large number of dynamic macroeconomic models, covering such topics as persistent unemployment, endogenous growth, and optimal fiscal-monetary policies. The macroeconomic methodology he uses is similar in spirit to that of the popular real business cycles theory, but the scope is much wider. All of the models are solved "by hand," making the underlying economic mechanisms particularly clear.
This intermediate level textbook concentrates on macroeconomic analysis and is one of the first to focus on imperfectly competitive labour and product markets. The authors present a `new Keynesian' treatment of macroeconomics. Its key characteristic is the use of wage bargaining and price-setting under imperfect competition, making product and labour market assumptions closer to the real world. These features are fully integrated in both closed and open economy analysis. The book provides access both to the important applied work on unemployment, inflation, and external balances, and to the journal literature on major questions of economic policy and performance, especially in Western Europe, available to undergraduates and non-specialists for the first time.
Orthodox economics operates within a hypothesized world of perfect competition in which perfect consumers and firms act to bring about supposedly optimal outcomes. The discrepancies between this model and the reality it claims to address are then attributed to particular imperfections in reality itself. Most heterodox economists seize on this fact and insist that the world is characterized by imperfect competition. But this only ties them to the notion of perfect competition, which remains as their point of departure and base of comparison. There is no imperfection without perfection. In Capitalism, Anwar Shaikh takes a different approach. He demonstrates that most of the central propositions of economic analysis can be derived without any reference to standard devices such as hyperrationality, optimization, perfect competition, perfect information, representative agents, or so-called rational expectations. This perspective allows him to look afresh at virtually all the elements of economic analysis: the laws of demand and supply, the determination of wage and profit rates, technological change, relative prices, interest rates, bond and equity prices, exchange rates, terms and balance of trade, growth, unemployment, inflation, and long booms culminating in recurrent general crises. In every case, Shaikh's innovative theory is applied to modern empirical patterns and contrasted with neoclassical, Keynesian, and Post-Keynesian approaches to the same issues. Shaikh's object of analysis is the economics of capitalism, and he explores the subject in this expansive light. This is how the classical economists, as well as Keynes and Kalecki, approached the issue. Anyone interested in capitalism and economics in general can gain a wealth of knowledge from this ground-breaking text.
Most labor economics textbooks pay little attention to actual labor markets, taking as reference a perfectly competitive market in which losing a job is not a big deal. The Economics of Imperfect Labor Markets is the only textbook to focus on imperfect labor markets and to provide a systematic framework for analyzing how labor market institutions operate. This expanded, updated, and thoroughly revised second edition includes a new chapter on labor-market discrimination; quantitative examples; data and programming files enabling users to replicate key results of the literature; exercises at the end of each chapter; and expanded technical appendixes. The Economics of Imperfect Labor Markets examines the many institutions that affect the behavior of workers and employers in imperfect labor markets. These include minimum wages, employment protection legislation, unemployment benefits, active labor market policies, working-time regulations, family policies, equal opportunity legislation, collective bargaining, early retirement programs, education and migration policies, payroll taxes, and employment-conditional incentives. Written for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students, the book carefully defines and measures these institutions to accurately characterize their effects, and discusses how these institutions are today being changed by political and economic forces. Expanded, thoroughly revised second edition New chapter on labor-market discrimination New quantitative examples New data sets enabling users to replicate key results of the literature New end-of-chapter exercises Expanded technical appendixes Unique focus on institutions in imperfect labor markets Integrated framework and systematic coverage Self-contained chapters on each of the most important labor-market institutions
In the early 1980s, rational expectations and new classical economics dominated macroeconomic theory. This essay evolved from theauthors' profound disagreement with that trend. It demonstrates notonly how the new classical view got macroeconomics wrong, but also howto go about doing macroeconomics the right way.
This thesis was stimulated throughout the time of my participation in a research project on Dynamic Macroeconomics, supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The starting point was the central question of how to integrate price setting firms in a dynamic disequilibrium model. Almost all recent literature on imperfect competition in macroeconomics applies the objective demand approach by assuming that firms know the true demand curve they are faced with. While this approach can be ap plied in temporary monetary equilibrium models, it proves inadequate for formulating price adjustment in a dynamic disequilibrium model, where it has to be replaced by the concept of subjective demand. Based on this distinction, the thesis starts out with a comparison of the concepts of subjective and objective demand in an abstract framework and surveys the literature on general equilibrium theory with imperfect competition. The objective demand approach is criticized not only on the grounds of its strong rationality requirements and existence problems, but also by the observation that it cannot be applied successfully to characterize determinate rational expectations equilibria in intertemporal macroeco nomics. Finally, price setting firms using subjective demand functions are integrated in a dynamic disequilibrium model in order to study mo nopolistic and oligopolistic price adjustment.
What happens if an employer cuts wages by one cent? Much of labor economics is built on the assumption that all the workers will quit immediately. Here, Alan Manning mounts a systematic challenge to the standard model of perfect competition. Monopsony in Motion stands apart by analyzing labor markets from the real-world perspective that employers have significant market (or monopsony) power over their workers. Arguing that this power derives from frictions in the labor market that make it time-consuming and costly for workers to change jobs, Manning re-examines much of labor economics based on this alternative and equally plausible assumption. The book addresses the theoretical implications of monopsony and presents a wealth of empirical evidence. Our understanding of the distribution of wages, unemployment, and human capital can all be improved by recognizing that employers have some monopsony power over their workers. Also considered are policy issues including the minimum wage, equal pay legislation, and caps on working hours. In a monopsonistic labor market, concludes Manning, the "free" market can no longer be sustained as an ideal and labor economists need to be more open-minded in their evaluation of labor market policies. Monopsony in Motion will represent for some a new fundamental text in the advanced study of labor economics, and for others, an invaluable alternative perspective that henceforth must be taken into account in any serious consideration of the subject.