Unlike the papers of some other great economists, those of Kenneth Arrow are being read and studied today with even greater care and attention than when they first appeared in journals. This publication of his collected papers, to be completed in seven topical volumes, will be welcomed by economists and other social scientists and in particular by graduate students, who can draw from them the deep knowledge and taste in the selection of scientific problems that only a master can offer.

This volume is concerned with the foundations of neo-classical economic analysis. General equilibrium is a theory of prices in which all of the actions of the economic agents in an economy are determined simultaneously and in a decentralized fashion. The price system, determined in competitive markets, guides actions for both firms and individual consumers. All of the complex interrelations of the economy are distilled into the determination of this price system.

In these papers, Arrow examines the conditions under which such a price system would exist. He also clarifies the conditions under which the system can or cannot achieve an optimum. In the latter case, when “market failures” are present, he shows the role of a benevolent government in helping to overcome the induced inefficiencies.

The tasks of macroeconomics are to interpret observations on economic aggregates in terms of the motivations and constraints of economic agents and to predict the consequences of alternative hypothetical ways of administering government economic policy. General equilibrium models form a convenient context for analyzing such alternative government policies. In the past ten years, the strengths of general equilibrium models and the corresponding deficiencies of Keynesian and monetarist models of the 1960s have induced macroeconomists to begin applying general equilibrium models.

This book describes some general equilibrium models that are dynamic, that have been built to help interpret time-series of observations of economic aggregates and to predict the consequences of alternative government interventions. The first part of the book describes dynamic programming, search theory, and real dynamic capital pricing models. Among the applications are stochastic optimal growth models, matching models, arbitrage pricing theories, and theories of interest rates, stock prices, and options. The remaining parts of the book are devoted to issues in monetary theory; currency-in-utility-function models, cash-in-advance models, Townsend turnpike models, and overlapping generations models are all used to study a set of common issues. By putting these models to work on concrete problems in exercises offered throughout the text, Thomas Sargent provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of these models of money. An appendix on functional analysis shows the unity that underlies the mathematics used in disparate areas of rational expectations economics.

This book on dynamic equilibrium macroeconomics is suitable for graduate-level courses; a companion book, Exercises in Dynamic Macroeconomic Theory, provides answers to the exercises and is also available from Harvard University Press.

Andreu Mas-Colell revolutionized our understanding of competitive markets, price formation, and the behavior of market participants. General Equilibrium and Game Theory offers readers a compendium of his most important scholarly contributions, gathering in a single volume the groundbreaking papers that have solidified his standing as one of the preeminent economic theorists of our time.

Built upon the foundations of neoclassical economics, Mas-Colell’s work is distinguished by a mathematical and analytical elegance that brings theory closer to real-world situations. He overturns the standard assumption of general equilibrium theory—that markets are perfectly competitive and their participants are perfectly rational—and concludes that neither the law of supply and demand nor the existence of equilibrium prices depends on the rationality of agents. Similarly, Mas-Colell (working with Sergiu Hart) challenges classical game theory’s reliance on rational behavior, demonstrating that adaptation and learning shape the dynamics of repeated games.

Addressing central questions of finance, trade, industrial organization, and welfare economics, Mas-Colell shows the surprising power and versatility of differentiability and linear-space mathematical techniques, and he emphasizes the fruitfulness of cooperative game-theory approaches, such as Shapley value theory and the Bargaining Set, for understanding competition and distribution. General Equilibrium and Game Theory is a signal contribution to economic theory and an invaluable resource for anyone wishing to study the craft of a master of economic modeling.

Economies are constantly in flux, and economists have long sought reliable means of analyzing their dynamic properties. This book provides a succinct and accessible exposition of modern dynamic (or intertemporal) macroeconomics. The authors use a microeconomics-based general equilibrium framework, specifically the overlapping generations model, which assumes that in every period there are two generations which overlap. This model allows the authors to fully describe economies over time and to employ traditional welfare analysis to judge the effects of various policies. By choosing to keep the mathematical level simple and to use the same modeling framework throughout, the authors are able to address many subtle economic issues. They analyze savings, social security systems, the determination of interest rates and asset prices for different types of assets, Ricardian equivalence, business cycles, chaos theory, investment, growth, and a variety of monetary phenomena.

Introduction to Dynamic Macroeconomic Theory will become a classic of economic exposition and a standard teaching and reference tool for intertemporal macroeconomics and the overlapping generations model. The writing is exceptionally clear. Each result is illustrated with analytical derivations, graphically, and by worked out examples. Exercises, which are strategically placed, are an integral part of the book.

Dissatisfied with the explanations of the business cycle provided by the Keynesian, monetarist, New Keynesian, and real business cycle schools, Edmund Phelps has developed from various existing strands—some modern and some classical—a radically different theory to account for the long periods of unemployment that have dogged the economies of the United States and Western Europe since the early 1970s. Phelps sees secular shifts and long swings of the unemployment rate as structural in nature. That is, they are typically the result of movements in the natural rate of unemployment (to which the equilibrium path is always tending) rather than of long-persisting deviations around a natural rate itself impervious to changing structure. What has been lacking is a “structuralist” theory of how the natural rate is disturbed by real demand and supply shocks, foreign and domestic, and the adjustments they set in motion.

To study the determination of the natural rate path, Phelps constructs three stylized general equilibrium models, each one built around a distinct kind of asset in which firms invest and which is important for the hiring decision. An element of these models is the modern economics of the labor market whereby firms, in seeking to dampen their employees’ propensities to quit and shirk, drive wages above market-clearing levels-the phenomenon of the “incentive wage”—and so generate involuntary unemployment in labor-market equilibrium. Another element is the capital market, where interest rates are disturbed by demand and supply shocks such as shifts in profitability, thrift, productivity, and the rate of technical progress and population increase. A general-equilibrium analysis shows how various real shocks, operating through interest rates upon the demand for employees and through the propensity to quit and shirk upon the incentive wage, act upon the natural rate (and thus equilibrium path).

In an econometric and historical section, the new theory of economic activity is submitted to certain empirical tests against global postwar data. In the final section the author draws from the theory some suggestions for government policy measures that would best serve to combat structural slumps.