Walras's law

Walras' Law

The principle that, if all markets for all goods and services in an economy are balanced, then the market for a specific good or service must also be balanced. Walras' law is based on the idea that excess demand and supply in an economy must add to zero. Thus, if there is no excess demand or supply elsewhere in an economy, then there can be no excess in a given market. Walras' law contradicts the Keynesian notion that involuntary unemployment can exist when an economy is otherwise in equilibrium because, according to the law, the labor market must itself be balanced. Critics of the law maintain that it does not consider financial markets and their effect on the markets for goods and services.

Walras's law

the proposition that the total value of goods demanded in an economy (prices times quantities demanded) is always identically equal to the total value of goods supplied (prices times quantities supplied). This situation can occur only in a BARTER economy or an economy that uses some form of MONEY for transactions where all money is immediately used for exchange. In an economy that also uses money as a store of value, it is conceivable that the demand for and supply of money does not equate to the demand for and supply of goods, that is, people may SAVE (or overspend). See also SAY's LAW.

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Walras' Law

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He argues that "Walras's Law cuts to the heart of the matter.

Free Banking: Theory, History, and a Laissez-Faire Model

What economists three generations later were to call Walras's Law is the principle that any market in which people are planning to buy more than is for sale must be counterbalanced by a market or markets in which people are planning to buy less.

The flight to quality: why U.S. Treasury bonds are so beloved

Note that Walras's Law requires that the profits of the firms go to the individual.

Small menu costs and large business cycles: an extension of the Mankiw model

, n) are single-valued continuous functions in P; the excess demand functions are positive homogenous of degree 0; or [E.sub.i] ([lambda]p) = [E.sub.i](p) for [lambda] [greater than] 0, p [epsilon] P(i = 1,2, ...,n); Walras's law holds, that is, (p,E(p)) = 0 identically in P; weak gross substitutability prevails, that is, [E.sub.i]([p.sup.*]) for [p.sup.*] [greater than or equal to] [E.sub.i](p) for [p.sup.*] [greater than or equal to]p, [[p.sup.*].sub.i] = [p.sub.i] everywhere in P(i = 1,2,...,n); and we are concerned with the possibility of a competitive equilibrium.

Mining Improbable Postulates and the Theory of Diverting Toys

In point of fact, Mundell (1991) had identified "...exactly sixteen ways of looking at the balance of trade...(e)ight of...(which)...can be deduced from the application of Walras's law in the national and international economy..." (p.202).

Are trade deficits that bad?

Dornbusch and Fischer |1990, 125~ are assuming that: "When the money market is in equilibrium..., the bond market, too, is in equilibrium...." Their analysis winds up with monetary expansion producing an excess demand for goods unmatched by an excess supply of anything else, thus violating Walras's Law.(13)

Through the use of Walras's Law, the IS-LM framework can correctly focus on just the two markets.

However, there is no clear presumption that this line slopes either upward or downward, although by Walras's Law it slopes less steeply upward than the LM curve or less steeply downward than the IS curve.

A clarification of the excess demand for or excess supply of money

It is well-known that the equation called Walras's Law operates in a mature Walrasian system and specifies that the sum in numeraire of the excess demands for all final commodities, including numeraire A itself, vanishes identically [Morrison, 1996, pp.

Money and banking in a mature Walrasian economy

The reason for this is that fixprice theory virtually jettisons Walras's law. It is demonstrated that Walras's law makes the general equilibrium analysis of monopoly very tractable, although it was long thought that monopoly and general equilibrium were incompatible.

With fixprice theory, expressed demands and Walras's law part company.

To digress, arguably the best way to describe Walras's law is that it is whatever one gets when the budget constraints for all individuals are aggregated.