The Medieval Village Economy: A Study of the Pareto Mapping in General Equilibrium Models - Rilegato

Townsend, Robert M.

9780691042701: The Medieval Village Economy: A Study of the Pareto Mapping in General Equilibrium Models

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691042705 ISBN 13: 9780691042701

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 1993

Robert Townsend has made path-breaking contributions to contract theory and general equilibrium analysis. In this book, he combines the theory of general economic equilibrium with the notion that allocations and institutions of a given economy might be Pareto optimal to try to explain various salient features of the medieval village economy. The medieval village economy in many ways reflects the economies of poor high-risk agrarian villages of the contemporary world and serves as an ideal testing ground for Townsend's theories.

The environment of the medieval village resembles those of relatively simple models with such key elements as uncertainty and private information, and its institutions display distinctive features such as fragmented landholding patterns. In this book standard models of macroeconomics and the literature on contract theory and mechanism design are reinterpreted, applied, and extended. The author draws both descriptive institutional material and particular parameter values from historical observations, and characterizes solutions to the models analytically and numerically. The idea is to see whether the observed outcomes can be explained, shedding light both on the historical material and the models themselves.

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Recensione:

"Townsend's interesting book is a welcome addition to a string of recent works by leading economic theorists.... [He] views the medieval village as a closed economy characterized by the absence of markets, by aggregate and idiosyncratic risk, and by private information regarding output and actions."--Journal of Economic Literature

Contenuti:

	List of Figures
	List of Tables
	Preface
	Acknowledgments
Ch. 1	Introduction	1
1.1	Motivation and Outline
1.2	Historical Background
Ch. 2	Uncertainty and Landholding Patterns	20
2.1	Statistics on Crop Yields
2.2	Risk-Allocation in an Arrow-Debreu Model with Cross-Household Diversity
2.3	Division of Land Types as an Ex Ante Solution to the Risk-Allocation Problem
2.4	Spatial Division as an Ex Ante Solution with Costs of Fragmentation
2.5	Multiple Crops and the Diet
2.6	Risk Allocation with Multiple Goods and Preferences Aggregation over Diverse Households
2.7	Multiple Goods and the Land-Crop Allocation Problem
Ch. 3	Storage as Risk Reduction	61
3.1	Some Striking observations on Carryover
3.2	The Neoclassical Growth-Stabilization Model with Dual Storage Possibilities
3.3	The Representativeness of Carryover Observations in Models with Internal Diversity
3.4	The Adequacy of Storage as a Self-Insurance Device
3.5	Carryover with Starvation: An Alternative Theory with Nonconvex, Nonseparable Preferences
Ch. 4	Labor Arrangements	74
4.1	Some Observations on Disparate Landholdings and Labor Arrangements
4.2	Consumption-Labor Allocations with Crop Production and Utility from Leisure
4.3	Implications of Consumption-Labor Theory for Observed and Unobserved Arrangements
Ch. 5	Rentals width Unobserved Outputs	86
5.1	Monastic Payments
5.2	Risk Sharing with Private Information on Crop Output
5.3	Optimal Multiperiod Tie-Ins
5.4	Costly State Verification
Ch. 6	Sharecropping with Unobserved Inputs	97
6.1	Share Rents among and within Villas
6.2	The Moral Hazard Problem and the Nature of Optimial Sharing Rules
6.3	The Gain from Randomization
6.4	Efficient Intertemporal Tie-Ins
6.5	Optimal Cross-Household Tie-Ins
6.6	Economywide Reporting Systems
Ch. 7	An Incentive Theory of Landholdings	120
7.1	The Importance of Idiosyncratic Shocks
7.2	A Numerical Example of Information-Constrained Landholdings
7.3	Incentive Schemes with Costly Monitoring of Labor Effort
7.4	Landholdings with Indivisible and Privately Held Oxen
Ch. 8	Conclusion	133
	References	137
	Index	141