Imperfect Competition, Nonclearing Markets and Business Cycles

In recent years the field of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models has emerged as the central field of macroeconomics. These models give a unified treatment of growth and fluctuations in a general equilibrium framework where all agents behave rationally. A particularly successful part of this field introduces imperfect competition and nonclearing markets into this framework, which also leads to the study of problems like unemployment. This timely volume gives a full account of the field, starting with the various general equilibrium traditions that ultimately led to this research area, and then describing the evolution of the models, with special emphasis on how they succeeded in representing features of dynamics that other models failed to reproduce.

This collection will be an invaluable source of reference for professors and graduate students specializing in macroeconomics. It should also be of interest to students of the history of economic thought, as it shows how apparently antagonistic subfields ended up merging to produce a better synthetic theory.

Edited by Jean-Pascal Bénassy, Directeur de Recherches, CNRS and Research Associate, CEPREMAP, Paris, France