微观经济学第17、18章 要素市场 收入分配不平等.ppt

* 11 11 Again, these exercises should not be difficult, but students learn more if they do the exercises themselves. The exercise in Part C segues nicely into the case study on productivity and wages that follows. This scenario, in fact, will occur over the coming 10-15 years. * * * * * 53 54 54 68 * 70 78 79 80 * Doomsday scenarios. Students are very interested in the doomsday issue. When will we run out of nonrenewable resources such as the hydrocarbon fuels? (Minerals are different because they can be recycled. They are nonrenewable, but somewhat durable.) Some numbers for your class: At the current usage rate and the current growth rate of usage and assuming that we will discover no new reserves, the world runs out of coal in 2082, natural gas in 2043, and oil in 2030. But, we discover new resources every year that exceed our usage so the time to an empty tank keeps extending. The really neat bit of analysis that addresses doomsday head on is the Hotelling Principle. The textbook keeps this material as simple as possible without losing the point. You can elaborate a bit and explain the end-game a bit more fully if you wish. To do so, you draw a demand curve for coal that hits the y-axis at the so-called “choke price.” You will explain that today’s expectation of the choke price and today’s expectation of the year that the resource runs out determines today’s price. That price, P, is the expected choke price, PCHOKE, discounted by the expected number of years to running out, T. That is, P = PCHOKE/(1 + r)T. No one actually performs the calculation of this equilibrium price, but rational owners of reserves of the natural resource behave as if they performed the calculation. At each point in time, the future price is expected to rise at a rate equal to the interest rate. But the actual price fluctuates because expectations about the choke price and the number of years left fluctuate. And historically, the prices of many resources have fallen because the T h