When Demand Creates its Own Supply: Saving Traps

Journal article: The mechanism by which aggregate supply creates the income that generates its matching demand (called Say’s Law), may not work in a general equilibrium with decentralized markets and savings in bonds or money. Full employment is an equilibrium, but convergence to that state is slow. A self-fulfilling precautionary motive to accumulate bonds (with a zero aggregate supply) can set the economy on an equilibrium path with a fast convergence towards a steady state with unemployment that may be an absorbing state from which no equilibrium path emerges to restore full employment.

Author(s)

Christophe Chamley

Journal
  • Review of Economic Studies
Date of publication
  • 2014
Keywords
  • Credit constraint
  • Financial crisis
  • Private debt
  • Say’s Law
  • Saving trap
Pages
  • 651-680
Version
  • 1
Volume
  • 81