General Equilibrium Analysis of Price Controls: A Computational Approach
构建了一个计算一般均衡框架，用于评估全面价格管制带来的福利成本，重点关注资源错配导致的效率损失，并分析谁受益谁受损。
This paper presents a computational general equilibrium framework for evaluating the welfare costs associated with economy-wide price controls. Other than traditional commodity-specific partial equilibrium analyses, most empirical literature on price controls concentrates on macroeconomic issues such as the impact on inflation and unemployment. Here we seek to reorient empirical literature on the effects of these controls towards efficiency losses from resource misallocation by providing a framework which can be used to address the issue of how large these economic inefficiencies are, and who gains and who loses from them. In this paper we present a general equilibrium computational framework for evaluating the welfare costs associated with economy-wide price controls. Price controls have been employed by governments all over the world, during war and peace, in response to all manners of threats (both real and imaginary), and in all ages.2 Other than traditional commodity-specific partial equilibrium analyses, most empirical literature on price controls concentrates on macroeconomic issues such as the impact on inflation and unemployment, despite the fact that the main attack on price controls is usually in terms of their efficiency losses from resource misallocation. Here we seek to reorient the empirical literature on the effects of the controls by providing a framework which can be used to address the issue of how large these economic inefficiencies are, and who gains and who loses from them. We use a general equilibrium model in which the equilibrium mechanism in the presence of price controls is endogenously-determined search costs. These yield additional welfare losses under price controls beyond those associated with more traditional tax or tariff models. The argument is that in an economy with price controls the greater the difference between controlled and market-clearing prices, the costlier it is for buyers and sellers to find each other and transact. A similar approach has been taken recently in two other papers in which we have been involved (see Nguyen 1985, Nguyen and Whalley 1986). The difference here is that, unlike these earlier papers, we explicitly incorporate production, and apply our approach to the issue of economy-wide controls using data for an actual economy. Since either the buying or selling side of a price controlled market can be