 Non-CES Aggregators: A Guided TourAnnual Review of Economics, 2023, vol. 15, issue 1, 235-265 Abstract: The constant-elasticity-of-substitution (CES) aggregator and its demand system are ubiquitous in business cycles theory, macroeconomic growth and development, international trade and other general equilibrium fields; this is because the CES aggregator has many knife-edge properties that help to keep the analysis tractable in the presence of many goods and factors. However, this also makes it hard to tell which properties of CES are responsible for certain results. Furthermore, it is necessary to relax some of those properties for certain applications. In this article, I review several classes of non-CES aggregators, each of which removes some properties of CES and keeps the rest to introduce some flexibility while retaining the tractability of CES as much as possible. These classes are named after the properties of CES they keep. I explain how these classes are related to each other and discuss their relative strengths and weaknesses to indicate which classes are suited for which applications. Keywords: aggregators; nonhomothetic preferences; CRS production functions; implicit additivity; gross substitutes; gross complements; essentials; inessentials (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:anr:reveco:v:15:y:2023:p:235-265 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1146/annurev-economics-082322-013910 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Annual Review of Economics from Annual Reviews Annual Reviews 4139 El Camino Way Palo Alto, CA 94306, USA. |
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