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In economics, aggregate behavior refers to economy-wide sums of individual behavior. It involves relationships between economic aggregates such as national income, government expenditure, and aggregate demand. For example, the consumption function is a relationship between aggregate demand for consumption and aggregate disposable income.
Models of aggregate behavior may be derived from direct observation of the economy, or from models of individual behavior. [1] Theories of aggregate behavior are central to macroeconomics.
Aggregate behavior is the study of interactions of factors which affect individual households or firms which in turn affect their economic behavior, subsequently resulting in the alterations of the economy. [2] As aggregate behavior is defined differently according to different schools of economical theories, households and firms react differently to fluctuations in the economy. The interactions between factors macroeconomics and microeconomics will result various changes, be it positive or negative.
The key factors of macroeconomics are gross domestic product, interest rates, employment indicators, fiscal policy and monetary policy. [3]
The key factors of microeconomics are supply and demand in individual markets, individual's choices, market externalities, and the labor market.
The interaction between these key microeconomic and macroeconomic factors will determine how each individual reacts to the market. For example, if an individual runs a shop in his local community whilst the economy of his country is in recession, that individual may not deem his market as being affected by the weak economy and may in fact view his business as booming and thus spend more in expanding his business. [4]
However, not all individuals will have the same stance. Some may save their money due to the weak economy. This leads to the Rational choice theory which theories that individual behaviors are skewered to each's desire to benefit the most from it. [5]
The economy's strength is measured based on each's gross domestic product. The demand for gross domestic product is measured by the aggregate demand function which is:
Aggregate demand is the sum of all individual demands in the market. [6] Having said that, aggregate behavior may or may not result in changes of the aggregate demand due to the different thoughts of economics.
In different schools of thought of economics, aggregate behavior may play a part in the entire process in determining the aggregate demand of the economy and in others it may not. In the neoclassical theory of economics, individual consumer behavior will not have any effect on the aggregate demand. This is due to the fact that even though consumers have different tastes and incomes, consumers will still purchase the goods and services to their own interest, thus ensuring that the resources are continuously flowing in the market. [7] In the Keynesian theory of economics, it is argued that both public and individual behavior will have an effect on aggregate demand due to expenditure. [8]
The aim of aggregate behavior is to consolidate individual's economical behavior into a simple logical variable, so as allow an economical analyst to analyse the data. Furthermore, the consumption function arguments allow the assumption that all individual consumers are similar in their economical behavior, thus allowing the economical analyst to create a macroeconomic model. [9]
The individual demand behavior can be said to be nonlinear, hence it is impossible to create an economic model. Thus, examining the appropriate aggregation factors will ensure more reasonable interpretation of the aggregate demand curve. Furthermore, as consumption is a key factor in aggregate demand and is heteoroagenic in nature, the aggregate economy model's will vary. Henceforth, consolidating individuals behavior will limit the complications that may arise, allowing the formatting of a more accurate model. [10]
Furthermore, in modern analysis of fiscal policies, more attention is given to dynamic considerations. Hence, by deriving the private sector's aggregate behavior from the utility maximising behavior of individuals, it allows a meaningful treatment of normative issues which allows macroeconomic analysis to be applicable to economic issues. [11]
Psychology plays a part in the neoclassical economics because aggregate behavior always falls back to individual behavior. In market equilibrium of no net profits, individuals are constrained maximisers of their objective functions. Psychology would therefore attempt to explain short-run, disequilibrium behavior in a manner which would be consistent with the no net profit market equilibrium. [12]
Keynes' theory that individuals behave under conditions of fundamental uncertainty and that decentralised markets always produce full employment and efficient use of resources has been broadly consistent with individual behavior in real world conditions. This thus deems Keynes' characterisation of capitalist economies being prone to financial instability, unemployment, irrational waste of resource and others. [13] This is one such speculation if one can aggregate an individual's behavior to the aggregate level.
§ Listed in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics [14] as Aggregation (Econometrics).
Keynesian economics are the various macroeconomic theories and models of how aggregate demand strongly influences economic output and inflation. In the Keynesian view, aggregate demand does not necessarily equal the productive capacity of the economy. Instead, it is influenced by a host of factors – sometimes behaving erratically – affecting production, employment, and inflation.
Microeconomics is a branch of mainstream economics that studies the behavior of individuals and firms in making decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources and the interactions among these individuals and firms. Microeconomics focuses on the study of individual markets, sectors, or industries as opposed to the national economy as whole, which is studied in macroeconomics.
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. For example, using interest rates, taxes, and government spending to regulate an economy's growth and stability. This includes regional, national, and global economies.
Neoclassical economics is an approach to economics in which the production, consumption, and valuation (pricing) of goods and services are observed as driven by the supply and demand model. According to this line of thought, the value of a good or service is determined through a hypothetical maximization of utility by income-constrained individuals and of profits by firms facing production costs and employing available information and factors of production. This approach has often been justified by appealing to rational choice theory, a theory that has come under considerable question in recent years.
In economics, general equilibrium theory attempts to explain the behavior of supply, demand, and prices in a whole economy with several or many interacting markets, by seeking to prove that the interaction of demand and supply will result in an overall general equilibrium. General equilibrium theory contrasts to the theory of partial equilibrium, which analyzes a specific part of an economy while its other factors are held constant. In general equilibrium, constant influences are considered to be noneconomic, therefore, resulting beyond the natural scope of economic analysis. The noneconomic influences is possible to be non-constant when the economic variables change, and the prediction accuracy may depend on the independence of the economic factors.
This aims to be a complete article list of economics topics:
Sir John Richards Hicks was a British economist. He is considered one of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century. The most familiar of his many contributions in the field of economics were his statement of consumer demand theory in microeconomics, and the IS–LM model (1937), which summarised a Keynesian view of macroeconomics. His book Value and Capital (1939) significantly extended general-equilibrium and value theory. The compensated demand function is named the Hicksian demand function in memory of him.
In macroeconomics, aggregate demand (AD) or domestic final demand (DFD) is the total demand for final goods and services in an economy at a given time. It is often called effective demand, though at other times this term is distinguished. This is the demand for the gross domestic product of a country. It specifies the amount of goods and services that will be purchased at all possible price levels. Consumer spending, investment, corporate and government expenditure, and net exports make up the aggregate demand.
In classical economics, Say's law, or the law of markets, is the claim that the production of a product creates demand for another product by providing something of value which can be exchanged for that other product. So, production is the source of demand. In his principal work, A Treatise on Political Economy, Jean-Baptiste Say wrote: "A product is no sooner created, than it, from that instant, affords a market for other products to the full extent of its own value." And also, "As each of us can only purchase the productions of others with his own productions – as the value we can buy is equal to the value we can produce, the more men can produce, the more they will purchase."
In economics, effective demand (ED) in a market is the demand for a product or service which occurs when purchasers are constrained in a different market. It contrasts with notional demand, which is the demand that occurs when purchasers are not constrained in any other market. In the aggregated market for goods in general, demand, notional or effective, is referred to as aggregate demand. The concept of effective supply parallels the concept of effective demand. The concept of effective demand or supply becomes relevant when markets do not continuously maintain equilibrium prices.
Consumption is the act of using resources to satisfy current needs and wants. It is seen in contrast to investing, which is spending for acquisition of future income. Consumption is a major concept in economics and is also studied in many other social sciences.
In economics, the consumption function describes a relationship between consumption and disposable income. The concept is believed to have been introduced into macroeconomics by John Maynard Keynes in 1936, who used it to develop the notion of a government spending multiplier.
In economics, an aggregate is a summary measure. It replaces a vector that is composed of many real numbers by a single real number, or a scalar. Consequently, there occur various problems that are inherent in the formulations that use aggregated variables.
Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium modeling is a macroeconomic method which is often employed by monetary and fiscal authorities for policy analysis, explaining historical time-series data, as well as future forecasting purposes. DSGE econometric modelling applies general equilibrium theory and microeconomic principles in a tractable manner to postulate economic phenomena, such as economic growth and business cycles, as well as policy effects and market shocks.
Microfoundations are an effort to understand macroeconomic phenomena in terms of economic agents' behaviors and their interactions. Research in microfoundations explores the link between macroeconomic and microeconomic principles in order to explore the aggregate relationships in macroeconomic models.
The neoclassical synthesis (NCS), neoclassical–Keynesian synthesis, or just neo-Keynesianism was a neoclassical economics academic movement and paradigm in economics that worked towards reconciling the macroeconomic thought of John Maynard Keynes in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). It was formulated most notably by John Hicks (1937), Franco Modigliani (1944), and Paul Samuelson (1948), who dominated economics in the post-war period and formed the mainstream of macroeconomic thought in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
New classical macroeconomics, sometimes simply called new classical economics, is a school of thought in macroeconomics that builds its analysis entirely on a neoclassical framework. Specifically, it emphasizes the importance of rigorous foundations based on microeconomics, especially rational expectations.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to economics:
Macroeconomic theory has its origins in the study of business cycles and monetary theory. In general, early theorists believed monetary factors could not affect real factors such as real output. John Maynard Keynes attacked some of these "classical" theories and produced a general theory that described the whole economy in terms of aggregates rather than individual, microeconomic parts. Attempting to explain unemployment and recessions, he noticed the tendency for people and businesses to hoard cash and avoid investment during a recession. He argued that this invalidated the assumptions of classical economists who thought that markets always clear, leaving no surplus of goods and no willing labor left idle.
The Principle of Effective Demand is the title ofchapter 3 of John Maynard Keynes's book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. The principle presented in that chapter is that the aggregate demand function and the aggregate supply function intersect each other at the point of effective demand and that this point can be consistent with a state of under-employment and under-capacity utilization. Another way of expressing this, in pre-Keynesian terminology, is to say that "demand creates its own supply" which gives primacy to a shifting demand function that can be insufficient to give an economy full employment in the long term, in contrast to the Say's law which insists "supply creates its own demand" and doesn't allow the possibility of long term unemployment as the supply figure is always, by definition, a fixed amount that demand will match.
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