Topic 2 Flashcards
5 assumptions of the LR closed economy model?
- firms maximise profits
- households maximise utility
- technology is fixed
- Say’s law
- markets always clear
What is Say’s law?
Supply determines output and creates demand
Why is Y fixed?
K and L are exogenous, tf Y=F(K,L) is also fixed
What determines national income then?
NI is determined by factor prices (per unit prices of FofP)
Up to what point do firms demand labour and capital?
Until cost=benefit
real wage/rent=marginal product of factor
What is A in cobb-douglas production function?
Total factor productivity
Profit function for a competitive firm?
Profit = PY-WL-RK
where P=price of output, Y=output, W=wage, R=price of capital
tf optimisation problem - see solving it in notes
See and learn graph units of output vs Q. of labour
now
What does the distribution of national income state? (2)
1) No excess profits (all income goes to K or L)
2) Split is based on how marginal products change as L and K vary
What does the neoclasscial theory of income distribution state?
It states that each input factor is paid it’s marginal product
Given: Y=AK^(1-v)L^(v), what share of income will go to labour and what will go to capital?
Labour gets ‘v’, capital gets ‘(1-v)’
tf labour and capital’s share of income over time is roughly constant
LEARN PROOF IN NOTES!
Property of cobb-douglas PF?
As marginal product falls, factor use increases at the same rate
Note
Since capital is more concentrated than labour, and private capital is increasing, inequality too can be argued to be increasing since people are born with labour but not with capital (SEE TRENDS IN ACCUMULATION SLIDE!)
also technological progress -> increase demand for skilled workers tf increasing gap between pay rates of skilled and unskilled workers
What is the life cycle model?
Model that assumes individuals try to smooth consumption levels over time
Note
Government spending and taxes in this model are taken as exogenous variables
What is consumption roughly as a percentage of GDP in developed countries?
50-60%
What does this model assume regarding consumption?
Assumes it depends only on current income which takes into account any taxes paid (assumes most families cannot adopt complex lifetime approach to financial constraints)