Real Wages, Employment Structure, and the Aggregate Demand Curve in a Kaleckian Short-Run Model

1996 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Lavoie
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 953-998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ichiro Takahashi ◽  
Isamu Okada

Abstract Economists have investigated how price–wage rigidity influences macroeconomic stability. A widely accepted view asserts that increased rigidity destabilizes an economy by requiring a larger quantity adjustment. In contrast, the Old Keynesian view regards nominal rigidity as a stabilizing factor, because it reduces fluctuations in income and thus aggregate demand. To examine whether price–wage stickiness is stabilizing or destabilizing, we build an agent-based Wicksell–Keynes macroeconomic model, which is completely closed and absolutely free from any external shocks, including policy interventions. In the model, firms setting prices and wages make both employment and investment decisions under demand constraints, while a fractional-reserve banking sector sets the interest rate and provides the firms with investment funds. As investment involves a gestation period, it is conducive to overproduction, thereby causing alternate seller’s and buyer’s markets. In the baseline simulation, a stable economy emerges with short-run business cycles and long-run fluctuations. One unique feature of the economy is its remarkable resilience: When afflicted by persistent deflation, it often manages to reverse the deflationary spiral and get back on a growth track, ultimately achieving full or nearly full employment. The virtual experiments demonstrate that prices and wages must both be moderately rigid to ensure long-run stability. The key stabilizing mechanism is a recurring demand-sufficient economy, in which firms are allowed to increase employment while simultaneously cutting real wages.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 1228-1245
Author(s):  
V.I. Tsurikov ◽  

The mathematical model of the Giffen effect proposed in the article clearly demonstrates both the effect itself and the reasons for its manifestation. The main advantages of the model include its extreme simplicity, which opens up access to the widest circle of readers, the use of standard methods for solving the consumer choice problem, and the most important fundamental agreement with the results of the field experiment of Jensen and Miller. The model shows that any good for which there is a more expensive substitute can be of little value. This or that good is endowed with the appropriate property by a particular consumer due to his or her own preferences, income level and prevailing prices. Any good of little value, including those that can only be consumed by a high-income individual, may turn out to be Giffen’s goods. Therefore, the consumption of Giffen’s product cannot be considered as evidence of the low standard of living of the consumer. According to the model, an increase in demand for an increasingly expensive low-value good, which is the essence of the Giffen paradox, is the result of optimizing a set of goods, i.e. the result of rational consumer behavior. It is shown that for the manifestation of the Giffen effect, it is necessary that the amount of funds allocated by the consumer for the purchase of a low-value good and its more expensive substitute falls into a certain rather narrow range of values. The failures of numerous and long-term studies aimed at detecting empirical manifestations of Giffen behavior in various historical events are explained by the fact that the corresponding analysis was carried out on the basis of averaged rather than individual values of demand for all categories of consumers. As a result, the negative slope of the aggregate demand curve turned out to be dominant over the positive sections of certain individual demand curves.


2006 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 549-570 ◽  
Author(s):  
ISABEL SANZ-VILLARROYA

This article analyses the short-run periods that can be derived from the GDP per capita series for Argentina between 1875 and 1990, after extracting its segmented long-run trend using time series techniques and unit root tests. It also studies the economic forces which, from the aggregate demand side, might provide an explanation for this behaviour. This mode of operation makes it possible to identify successive cycles more accurately than in previous studies. A high level of agreement is observed between the results of this study and arguments in the literature regarding the causes shaping these short-run periods: the analysis demonstrates that exports were the key factor until 1932 while after this year consumption and investment came to predominate.


2008 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Apergis ◽  

This paper investigates the existence and direction of a relationship between real wages and employment. Using a panel from ten different OECD countries, from 1950 to 2005, it applies panel cointegration and causality methodology. This study finds statistical evidence for a long run relationship between these two variables. However, it firmly rejects the hypothesis that wages cause employment in the short-run. Thus the results support Keynes’s view namely, real wages fall because employment increases, presumably via an increase in demand. The results imply that real wage reduction is not sufficient to induce an expansion of output and employment.


1987 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-50
Author(s):  
Richard B. Hansen ◽  
Ken McCormick ◽  
Janet M. Rives

2002 ◽  
Vol 182 ◽  
pp. 72-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jagjit S. Chadha ◽  
Charles Nolan

We outline a number of ‘stylised’ facts on the UK business cycle obtained from analysis of the long-run UK annual dataset. The findings are to some extent standard. Consumption and investment are pro-cyclical, with productivity playing a dominant role in explaining business cycle fluctuations at all horizons. Money neutrality obtains over the long run but there is clear evidence of non-neutrality over the short run, particularly at the business cycle frequencies. Business cycle relationships with the external sector via the real exchange rate and current account are notable. Postwar, the price level is counter-cyclical and real wages are pro-cyclical, as are nominal interest rates. Modern general equilibrium macroeconomic models capture many of these patterns.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 509-568 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tania Babina ◽  
Chotibhak Jotikasthira ◽  
Christian Lundblad ◽  
Tarun Ramadorai

Abstract We evaluate the impacts of tax policy on asset returns using the U.S. municipal bond market. In theory, tax-induced ownership segmentation limits risk sharing, creating downward-sloping regions of the aggregate demand curve for the asset. In the data, cross-state variation in tax privilege policies predicts differences in in-state ownership of local municipal bonds; the policies create incentives for concentrated local ownership. High tax privilege states have muni bond yields that are more sensitive to variations in supply and local idiosyncratic risk. The effects are stronger when local investors face correlated background risk and/or diminishing marginal nonpecuniary benefits from holding local assets.


Author(s):  
Samuele Bibi

Abstract This paper focuses on the dynamics analysis from the ultra-short to the short period from a Post-Keynesian perspective. It is argued that the construction of both the short-run and the long-run models are based on the critical assumption of an equilibrium between aggregate demand and aggregate supply. Starting from the work by Metzler (1941. The nature and stability of inventory cycles, The Review of Economic Statistics, 113–29), the issue of equilibrium and stability is investigated inside a Keynesian–Kaleckian perspective. The suggested model analyses under which conditions the standard Kaleckian conclusions are still valid considering a disequilibrium situation. Two scenarios are simulated: one with fixed expectations as in Metzler (1941. The nature and stability of inventory cycles, The Review of Economic Statistics, 113–29) and another based on adaptive expectations and asymmetric behaviour of the wages–unemployment relation. The model questions the effective demand labour curve and suggests that an increase in real autonomous expenditures, mainly by the government, might be even more essential than what is generally considered in the Kaleckian literature, to avoid increasing unemployment a world with increasing wages.


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