1st Edition

The Representative Agent in Macroeconomics

By James E Hartley, James E. Hartley Copyright 1997
    240 Pages
    by Routledge

    240 Pages
    by Routledge

    Rpresentative agent models have become a predominant means of studying the macroeconomy in modern economics without there being much discussion in the literature about their propriety or usefulness. This volume evaluates the use of these models in macroeconomics, examining the justifications for their use and concluding that representative agent models are neither a proper nor a particularly useful means of studying aggregate behaviour.

    Part I Why representative agents?1 INTRODUCTION 2 THE ORIGINS OF THE REPRESENTATIVE AGENT 3 ARGUMENT FOR THE NEW CLASSICAL USE OF REPRESENTATIVE AGENT MODELS Part II The Lucas Critique 4 BEYOND TASTE AND TECHNOLOGY PARAMETERS IN MACROECONOMICS Part III The Walrasian tradition 5 WALRASIAN METHODOLOGY 6 MARSHALLIAN METHODOLOGY 7 THE NEW CLASSICALS AS WALRASIAN ECONOMISTS Part IV Microfoundations 8 MICROFOUNDATIONS: AUSTRIAN STYLE 9 THE TRADITIONAL CASE FOR MICROFOUNDATIONS 10 THE AGGREGATION PROBLEM 11 INDIVIDUAL AND MARKET EXPERIMENTS 12 THE REPRESENTATIVE AGENT VERSUS MICROFOUNDATIONS 13 THE MYTH OF MICROFOUNDATIONS Part V Whither macroeconomics? 14 AFTER REPRESENTATIVE AGENT MODELS

    Biography

    James E. Hartley is Assistant Professor of Economics at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts