Antonio Villar Livres

The book offers a comprehensive and updated exploration of general equilibrium theory, focusing on production economies with non-convex production sets. It features five new chapters and extensive revisions of existing content to reflect recent advancements in the field. Aimed at both graduate students and researchers, it emphasizes a unified approach to complex economic problems while maintaining manageable mathematical complexity. The systematic exposition covers key results on equilibrium existence and efficiency, making it a valuable reference for those interested in economic theory.

These lectures aim to help readers understand the logics and nature of the main indicators of inequality and poverty, with special attention to their social welfare underpinnings. The key approach consists in linking inequality and poverty measurement with welfare evaluation. As concern for inequality and poverty stems from ethical considerations, the measurement of those aspects necessarily involves some value judgments. Those value judgments can be linked, directly or indirectly, to welfare assessments on the distribution of personal and social opportunities. Inequality and poverty are thus considered to be partial aspects of the welfare evaluation of the opportunities in a given society. The volume includes two applications that illustrate how the models can be implemented. They refer to inequality of opportunity and poverty in education, using PISA data.

This revised and enlarged edition deals with the analysis of production economies in which firms may exhibit increasing returns to scale, or other forms of non-convexities.

This book explores general equilibrium with firms exhibiting increasing returns to scale, without assuming the convexity of production sets. It presents a comprehensive model and addresses key issues of existence and optimality. Increasing returns is a crucial yet challenging topic for economists, as it highlights a technological phenomenon that conflicts with competitive market dynamics. The analysis is complex because standard concepts often fail, particularly in defining supply mappings. Additionally, existing models struggle to resolve fundamental questions: normative models with nonconvex firms and marginal pricing do not yield efficient outcomes, while positive models cannot effectively incorporate monopolistic competition for firms with increasing returns. This monograph aims to demonstrate that the increasing returns question is neither insurmountable nor discouraging. It will show that the analysis can utilize tools similar to those in standard competitive models. The relevance of the findings will be emphasized, suggesting that a clearer understanding of increasing returns can enhance economic theory and practice.