Matt Nolan

General Equilibrium and factor shares

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Note:   I want you all to be highly critical of my posts on factor shares – and where you can throw literature at me.  I wrote a bunch of posts in a single day based on one book (and some prior knowledge), I have no appeal to authority here and would love to have your ideas thrown in there 🙂

I was surprised that there was a chapter focused solely in general equilibrium – and not GE in general, but competitive, neo-classical, GE.  I was especially surprised as such a model isn’t really “built” for distributional analysis – economists often say we need a different framework to do distributional work!

It is a neat chapter though, so let’s pop it in here 🙂 Read more

Matt Nolan

Neo-Ricardian factor shares

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Note:   I want you all to be highly critical of my posts on factor shares – and where you can throw literature at me.  I wrote a bunch of posts in a single day based on one book (and some prior knowledge), I have no appeal to authority here and would love to have your ideas thrown in there 🙂

Last time I said I thought Neo-Ricardian was Post-Keynesian – it seems like they have similar authors, but the essays focus on different “important elements”.  Furthermore, the direct issues with “neo-classical factor models” are indeed clearer here!  However, the focus seems much more on short-term, and in some ways monetary policy, issues rather than long-term trends in factor shares.  That is ok, but it is important to note that some of the Post-Keynesian models in these chapters are discussing different questions than the questions the earlier part of the book was based on. Read more

Matt Nolan

Discussion Tuesday

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Let’s think a little bit about value judgements shall we:

Every element, every linguistic and ontological device, is packed with implicit ethical assumptions.  As a result, it is impossible to frame trade-offs in any way that doesn’t involve unjustified moral assumptions.

Once again, remember that these are points for discussion – I am not saying I agree or disagree with them.

Matt Nolan

Post-Keynesian factor shares

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Note:   I want you all to be highly critical of my posts on factor shares – and where you can throw literature at me.  I wrote a bunch of posts in a single day based on one book (and some prior knowledge), I have no appeal to authority here and would love to have your ideas thrown in there 🙂

We are now in an area which is getting well outside my area of knowledge, so I’m hoping these essays will help tighten me up 🙂 .  I see there is an essay on Post-Keynesian income distribution work and a following one on Neo-Ricardian income distribution work (which I am marginally more familiar with) – I had thought they were the same thing, so hopefully I learn the difference while reading 🙂

I am sure many of you know more than me – and I’m more than happy to have things explained to me as I’m keen to learn.  Just remember, the goal here is to explore ideas about factor shares and what they mean in a distributional sense – not to dig too far into ideology or policy. Read more

Matt Nolan

A Top 10 on the labour market

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I recently did a Top 10 over at interest.co.nz, focused on the labour market.

With labour market conditions improving in New Zealand, and overseas, while technology changes and we recover from a long slow down, there are a lot of interesting points to consider – I suggest going over and having a look 😉

Matt Nolan

Marshall’s factor shares

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Note:   I want you all to be highly critical of my posts on factor shares – and where you can throw literature at me.  I wrote a bunch of posts in a single day based on one book (and some prior knowledge), I have no appeal to authority here and would love to have your ideas thrown in there 🙂

Now here is an area I don’t know much about.  Alfred Marshall is an amazing economist, Keynes said this about him – yes Keynes – so obviously he has a lot of respect.  He even has the typical microeconomics demand curve named after him (Marshallian demand).  However, it appears he had a distinct model of income distribution – one that was classicalist in its view of rent and factor supply (and its interest in secular changes such as population growth), but marginalist when it came to discussing demand for factors of production.  The model discussed in the essay comes solely from Principles, rather than other work by Marshall.

The description of the elements in Marshall’s theory, from the essay, are as follows: Read more