The purpose of this book is to give a sound economic foundation of finance. Finance is a coherent branch of applied economics that is designed to understand financial markets in order to give advice for practical financial decisions. This book argues that for a sound economic foundation of finance the famous general equilibrium model which in its modern form emphasizes the incompleteness of financial markets is well suited. The aim of the book is to demonstrate that financial markets can be meaningfully embedded into a more general system of markets including, for example, commodity markets. The interaction of these markets can be described via the well known notion of a competitive equilibrium. We argue that for a sound foundation this competitive equilibrium should be unique. In a first step we demonstrate that this essential goal cannot of be achieved based only on the rationality principle, i. e. on the assumption utility maximization of some utility function subject to the budget constraint. In particular we show that this important lack of structure is disturbing as well for the case of mean-variance utility functions which are the basis of the Capital Asset Pricing Model, one of the cornerstones of finance. The final goal of our book is to give reasonable restrictions on the agents' utility functions which lead to a well determined financial markets model.

The economic theory of general equilibrium underpins the most important models used in economic theory in general and in its more specialized areas such as macroeconomics, international trade, environmental economics, growth theory, and developmental economics. In Foundations of the Theory of General Equilibrium, leading academic scholar, Yves Balasko offers a good introduction to the economic theory of general equilibrium and makes use of various mathematical tools as intuitive and easy as possible. The second half of the book addresses properties of the general equilibrium model that are still at the frontier of current research. These properties deal with the characterization of economies with a unique equilibrium and, more generally, with the relationships between the number of equilibria and the fundamentals of an economy.

'This book makes compelling reading for anyone interested in exploring the foundations of monetary theory from a rigorous general equilibrium perspective.' – Gabriele Camera, Purdue University, US 'Introducing the Arrow-Debreu-Starr model of monetary general equilibrium, Professor Starr provides the best defense ever made for the relevance of the Walrasian model to the pure theory of money. While most monetary theorists ventured to the overlapping generations model and then to the search model, only to create recently a hybrid search-Walrasian model, Starr presents the culmination of a patient, career-long effort to integrate money into the basic Walrasian model, with realistic taxation critically helping the government's money to dominate.' – Dror Goldberg, Bar Ilan University, Israel The microeconomic foundation of the theory of money has long represented a puzzle to economic theory. Why is there Money? derives the foundations of monetary theory from advanced price theory in a mathematically precise family of trading post models. It has long been recognized that the fundamental theoretical analysis of a market economy is embodied in the Arrow-Debreu-Walras mathematical general equilibrium model, with one great deficiency: the analysis cannot accommodate money and financial institutions. In this groundbreaking book, Ross M. Starr addresses this problem directly, by expanding the Arrow-Debreu model to include a multiplicity of trading opportunities, with the resultant endogenous derivation of money as the carrier of value among them. This fundamental breakthrough is achieved while maintaining the Walrasian general equilibrium price-theoretic structure, augmented primarily by the introduction of separate bid and ask prices reflecting transaction costs. The result is foundations of monetary theory consistent with and derived from modern price theory. This fascinating book will provide a stimulating and thought-provoking read for academics and postgraduate students focusing on economics, macroeconomics, macroeconomic policy and finance, money and banking. Central bankers will also find much to interest them within this book.

This book addresses the gaps in undergraduate teaching of partial equilibrium analysis, providing a general equilibrium viewpoint to illustrate the assumptions underlying partial equilibrium welfare analysis. It remains unexplained, at least at the level of general economics teaching, in what sense partial equilibrium analysis is indeed a part of general equilibrium analysis. Partial equilibrium welfare analysis isolates a market for a single commodity from the rest of the economy, presuming that other things remain equal, and measures gains and losses by means of consumer surplus. This is a money metric that is supposed to be summable across individuals, recommending policy that maximizes the social surplus. But what justifies such apparently uni-dimensional practise? Within a general equilibrium framework, the assumption of no income effect is presented as the key condition, and substantive general equilibrium situations in which the condition emerges are presented. The analysis is extended to the case of uncertainty, in which the practice adopts aggregate expected consumer surplus, and scrutinizes when such practice is justified. Finally, the book illustrates partial equilibrium as an institutional artifact, meaning that institutional constraint induces individuals to behave as if they are in partial equilibrium. This volume forms an important contribution to the literature by researching why this disparity persists and the implications for economics education.