The paper disputes the negative conclusion of prof. Mandler on the thesis by Garegnani, Schefold, Parrinello that intertemporal general equilibrium theory too is undermined by reswitching and reverse capital deepening. The paper argues that Mandler’s conclusion rests upon highly criticisable assumptions that render the equations of intertemporal general equilibrium identical to those of general equilibria without capital goods. The Walrasian treatment of the capital endowment is criticized in Part I on the basis of its insufficient persistence, and of other ‘methodological’ criticisms that are systematically surveyed. In Part II it is shown through a numerical example that Mandler’s claim, that the assumption of a single consumer guarantees uniqueness of intertemporal equilibrium independently of reswitching or reverse capital deepening, rests on the absence of production of capital goods in the last period of the equilibrium; this assumption is thus revealed to be one of the tricks that prevents the existence of capital goods from changing the properties of the equilibrium relative to those of equilibria without capital
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Fabrizio Becatti).
Related research
Keywords:
Find related papers by JEL classification: B51 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Current Heterodox Approaches - - - Socialist; Marxian; Sraffian C62 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods and Programming - - - Existence and Stability Conditions of Equilibrium D5 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: