Part of a long-run project to put together a systematic database of prices and wages for the American contingents, this paper takes a first look at standards of living in a series of North American and Latin American cities.  From secondary sources we collected price data that - with diverse...

The paper examines the contentious issue of the extent of surplus labour that remains in China.  China was an extreme example of a surplus labour economy, but the rapid economic growth during the period of economic reform requires a reassessment of whether the second stage of the Lewis model...

We propose a general model of monopolistic competition, which encompasses existing models while being flexible enough to take into account new demand and competition features. The basic tool we use to study the market outcome is the elasticity of substitution at a symmetric consumption pattern,...

Recent extensions of the standard Dixit-Stiglitz (1977) model, that go beyond the CES sub-utility assumption, while maintaining monopolistic competition, have mainly emphasized the role of iintrasectoral substitutability. We argue that introducing oligopolistic competition can be an alternative...

Markets are incomplete when the assets available to the agents do not span the space of future contingencies. Efficiency is then assessed by the weak criterion of "constrained efficiency" (efficiency relative to the set of allocations compatible with the asset structure). That criterion requires...

This paper examines conditions which guarantee that the excess demand function of an exchange economy will satisfy the weak axiom in an open neighborhood of a given equilibrium price. This property ensures that the equilibrium is locally stable with respect to Walras tatonnement. A related issue...

In this paper we study the optimal growth path and its decentralization in a two-sector overlapping- generations model with pollution. One sector (power generation) is polluting and the other (final good) is not. Pollution is regulated by tradable emission permits. The issue is whether the...

The present note highlights the seminal contributions of Diamond, Drèze and Radner towards the integration of financial markets into general equilibrium modeling.

In this paper the existence of unemployment is partly explained as being the result of coordination failures. This is achieved by considering a standard general equilibrium model and splitting the set of commodities in two groups. The first group contains commodities like gold. The prices of...

We propose an objective for the firm in a model of production economies extending over time under uncertainty and with incomplete markets. We derive the objective of the firm from the assumption of initial-shareholders efficiency. Each shareholder is assumed to communicate to the firm her...