Perfect Competition

In his 1987 entry on ‘Perfect Competition’ in The New Palgrave, the author reviewed the question of the perfectness of perfect competition, and gave four alternative formalisations rooted in the so-called Arrow-Debreu-Mckenzie model. That entry is now updated for the second edition to include work done on the subject during the last twenty years. A fresh assessment of this literature is offered, one that emphasises the independence assumption whereby individual agents are not related except through the price system. And it highlights a ‘linguistic turn’ whereby Hayek’s two fundamental papers on ‘division of knowledge’ are seen to have devastating consequences for this research programme.Allocation of Resources; Perfect Competition; Exchange Economy

The Harris-Todaro Hypothesis

The Harris-Todaro hypothesis replaces the equality of wages by the equality of ‘expected’ wages as the basic equilibrium condition in a segmented but homogeneous labour market, and in so doing it generates an equilibrium level of urban unemployment when a mechanism for the determination of urban wages is specified. This article reviews work in which the Harris-Todaro hypothesis is embedded in canonical models of trade theory in order to investigate a variety of issues in development economics. These include the desirability (or the lack thereof) of foreign investment, the complications of an informal sector, and the presence of clearly identifiable ethnic groups.Harris-Todaro; Wages; Labour Economics; Labour Market; Rural to Urban Migration

The Harris-Todaro Hypothesis

The Harris-Todaro hypothesis replaces the equality of wages by the equality of ‘expected’ wages as the basic equilibrium condition in a segmented but homogeneous labour market, and in so doing it generates an equilibrium level of urban unemployment when a mechanism for the determination of urban wages is specified. This article reviews work in which the Harris-Todaro hypothesis is embedded in canonical models of trade theory in order to investigate a variety of issues in development economics. These include the desirability (or the lack thereof) of foreign investment, the complications of an informal sector, and the presence of clearly identifiable ethnic groupsHarris-Todaro, Wages, Labour Economics, Labour Market, Rural to Urban Migration

Classical Turnpike Theory and the Economics of Forestry

Classical turnpike theory, as originally conceived by Samuelson, pertains to optimal growth theory over a large but infinite time horizon with given initial and terminal stocks. In this paper, we present two turnpike results in the context of the economics of forestry with given initial and terminal forest configurations. Our results depart from the general theory in that they pertain to a transitional production set which does not satisfy the assumptions of inaction and free disposal, and rely on a recently-discovered non-interiority assumption on concave (not necessarily differentiable) benefit functions that implies, and is implied by, the asymptotic convergence of good programs.