An incisive, unconventional assessment of general equilibrium theory; with a previously unpublished paper. Fischer Black is known for his brilliance as well as his sometimes controversial opinions. Highly respected for his scholarly writings in finance, he now moves into different territory with this incisive, unconventional assessment of general equilibrium theory and what that theory reveals about business cycles, growth, and labor economics. The general equilibrium approach, Black asserts, can be used to explain most of the economy's behavior. It can explain business cycles and growth without using sticky prices, irrationality, economies of scale, or imperfect competition. It can explain the volatility of consumption, output, sales, investment, and inventories with axiomatic utility and constant-returns-to-scale production. It can explain temporary layoffs, job changes with and without intervening unemployment, and the behavior of vacancies. It can explain lower wages in part-time jobs, wages that increase rapidly with time on the job, and the forces that cause migration from poor to rich countries. Although the general equilibrium approach can't be tested in conventional ways, it can be used to generate examples that explain stylized facts—generalized observations from the real world—that have preoccupied macroeconomists for the last decade. Black contrasts his interpretation of these facts with conventional interpretations. Finally, he reviews a substantial body of literature on these topics.

The general equilibrium approach, Black asserts, can be used to explain most of the economy's behavior. It can explain business cycles and growth without using sticky prices, irrationality, economies of scale, or imperfect competition. It can explain the volatility of consumption, output, sales, investment, and inventories with axiomatic utility and constant-returns-to-scale production. It can explain temporary layoffs, job changes with and without intervening unemployment, and the behavior of vacancies. It can explain lower wages in part-time jobs, wages that increase rapidly with time on the job, and the forces that cause migration from poor to rich countries. Although the general equilibrium approach cannot be tested in conventional ways, it can be used to generate examples that explain stylized facts - generalized observations from the real world - that have preoccupied macroeconomists for the last decade. Black contrasts his interpretation of these facts with conventional views. Finally, he reviews a substantial body of literature on these topics.

The book provides a hands-on introduction to computable general equilibrium (CGE) models, written at an accessible, undergraduate level.

General Equilibrium Theory: An Introduction treats the classic Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium model in a form accessible to graduate students and advanced undergraduates in economics and mathematics. Topics covered include mathematical preliminaries, households and firms, existence of general equilibrium, Pareto efficiency of general equilibrium, the First and Second Fundamental Theorems of Welfare Economics, the core and core convergences, future markets over time and contingent commodity markets under uncertainty. Demand, supply, and excess demand appear first as (point-valued) functions, then optionally as (set-valued) correspondences. The mathematics presented (with elementary proofs of the theorems) includes a real analysis, the Brouwer fixed point theorem, and separating and supporting hyperplane theorems. Optional chapters introduce the existence of equilibrium with set-valued supply and demand, the mathematics of upper and lower hemicontinuous correspondences, and the Kakutani fixed point theorem. The treatment emphasizes clarity and accessibility to the student through use of examples and intuition.

The central idea underlying this work is to convert the Walrasian general equilibrium structure (formalized in the 1950s by Kenneth Arrow, Gerard Debreu and others) from an abstract representation of an economy into realistic models of actual economies.

This book brings together the author's pioneering work, written over the last twenty years, on the use of differential methods in general equilibrium theory.

Modern business cycle theory and growth theory uses stochastic dynamic general equilibrium models. In order to solve these models, economists need to use many mathematical tools. This book presents various methods in order to compute the dynamics of general equilibrium models. In part I, the representative-agent stochastic growth model is solved with the help of value function iteration, linear and linear quadratic approximation methods, parameterised expectations and projection methods. In order to apply these methods, fundamentals from numerical analysis are reviewed in detail. In particular, the book discusses issues that are often neglected in existing work on computational methods, e.g. how to find a good initial value. In part II, the authors discuss methods in order to solve heterogeneous-agent economies. In such economies, the distribution of the individual state variables is endogenous. This part of the book also serves as an introduction to the modern theory of distribution economics. Applications include the dynamics of the income distribution over the business cycle or the overlapping-generations model. In an accompanying home page to this book, computer codes to all applications can be downloaded.