Jean-Pascal Bénassy

Jean-Pascal Bénassy (30 December 1948 – 7 December 2022 ) was a French economist known for his contribution to general disequilibrium theory.

Life and career

Jean-Pascal Bénassy was born on December 30, 1948, in Neuilly-sur-Seine as son of Jeannine Garçonnot and the surgeon Jean Bénassy. In 1973, he joined the Centre pour la recherche économique et ses applications as a researcher and became director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in 1975. ) and received the Guido Zerilli-Marimo Prize of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. He shared the concerns of Don Patinkin, Robert W. Clower, and Axel Leijonhufvud about the stability issues raised by John Maynard Keynes in chapter 19 of The General Theory. Similar to Edmond Malinvaud, he studied the dynamics of non-clearing markets and combined the idea by John R. Hicks that dynamics is a sequence of temporary equilibria with the idea by Paul Samuelson that dynamics describes the adjustment towards economic equilibrium. He used Clower's “dual-decision hypothesis“ as starting point of his models and tried to get rid of the concept of the Walrasian auction. To reach this objective, he assumed that agents have the ability to conjecture market conditions correctly. This led him to construct models with rationing, imperfect competition, non-clearing markets and business cycles.

Books