Event
Federico Echenique (CalTech), "Empirical Welfare Economics"
Friday, April 22, 2022 15:30to17:00
"Empirical Welfare Economics"
(CalTech)
Joint with Chris Chambers (Georgetown University)
April 22, 2022, 3:30 to 5:00 PM
Leacock 429
Host: Leonie Baumann
Field: Theory
Abstract:
Given demand data for a group of agents, we seek to make counterfactual welfare statements. Our main result considers whether there are convex preferences for which some candidate allocation is Pareto optimal. We show that this candidate allocation is possibly efficient if and only if it is efficient for the incomplete relation derived from the revealed preference relations and convexity. Similar ideas are used to address related questions: when the Kaldor criterion may be used to make welfare comparisons, what prices can be Walrasian equilibrium prices, and the possibility of a representative consumer when the income distribution is endogenous.
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