The Representative Agent in Macroeconomics (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy)

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. Book Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 4 Contents......Page 5 Acknowledgments......Page 11 INTRODUCTION......Page 14 THE ORIGINS OF THE REPRESENTATIVE AGENT......Page 20 ARGUMENT FOR THE NEW CLASSICAL USE OF REPRESENTATIVE AGENT MODELS......Page 30 BEYOND TASTE AND TECHNOLOGY PARAMETERS IN MACROECONOMICS......Page 44 WALRASIAN METHODOLOGY......Page 70 MARSHALLIAN METHODOLOGY......Page 84 THE NEW CLASSICALS AS WALRASIAN ECONOMISTS......Page 95 MICROFOUNDATIONS: AUSTRIAN STYLE......Page 116 THE TRADITIONAL CASE FOR MICROFOUNDATIONS......Page 131 THE AGGREGATION PROBLEM......Page 143 INDIVIDUAL AND MARKET EXPERIMENTS......Page 158 THE REPRESENTATIVE AGENT VERSUS MICROFOUNDATIONS......Page 169 THE MYTH OF MICROFOUNDATIONS......Page 187 AFTER REPRESENTATIVE AGENT MODELS......Page 208 Notes......Page 216 Bibliography......Page 222 Index......Page 235 James E. Hartley. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 211-223) And Index.