Constrained Inefficiency in Gei: a Geometric Argument

Abstract

In this paper we use global analysis to study the welfare properties of general equilibrium economies with incomplete markets (GEI). Our main result is to show that constrained Pareto optimal equilibria are contained in a submanifold of the equilibrium set. This result is explicitly derived for economies with real assets and fixed aggregate resources, of which real numeraire assets are a special case. As a by product of our analysis, we propose an original global parametrization of the equilibrium set that generalizes to incomplete markets the classical one, first, proposed by Lange (1942).