General Equilibrium Analysis of Price Controls: A Computational Approach

This paper presents a computational general equilibrium framework for evaluating the welfare costs associated with economy-wide price controls. Other than traditional commodity-specific partial equilibrium analyses, most empirical literature on price controls concentrates on macroeconomic issues, such as the impact on inflation and unemployment. Here the authors seek to reorient empirical literature on the effects of these controls toward efficiency losses from resource misallocation by providing a framework that can be used to address the issue of how large these economic inefficiencies are, and who gains and who loses from them. Copyright 1990 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.