Background
BERGSTROM, Theodore Carl was born in 1940 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.
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Theodore Carl BERGSTROM
Edit ProfileEducation
Bachelor of Arts (Mathematics) Carleton College., 1962. Doctor of Philosophy Stanford University, 1968.
Career
Assistant Professor, Association Professor, Professor of Economics, Washington University, Street Louis, Missouri, 1966-1975. Professor of Economics, University Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America, since 1975.
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Much of my work consists of applications of the techniques of modern mathematical economics to problems of social interaction. Examples include work on benevolent consumers, competitive equilibrium with slavery, law and the core when there are externalities, the valuation of human life, the theory of health insurance, voting theory, and the theory of marriage and the family. I have also done work on the foundations of the theory of general equilibrium, welfare economics, and public finance.
This research includes contributions to the technical literature on the existence of competitive equilibrium (for example, dispensing with the assumptions of free disposal and monotonicity), the existence of Lindahl equilibrium and its properties, and the determination of necessary and sufficient conditions for the Pareto optimal supply of public goods to be independent of income distribution. A third area of interest is empirical estimates of demand for local public goods. I developed (with R. Goodman) a theory and method for estimating individual demand functions for public goods from cross-sectional data on the expenditures of munici-
palities and on the economic and demographic characteristics of their populations.
More recently, Doctorate. Rubinfeld, P. Shapiro, and I have developed a method for estimating demand functions for public goods from individual survey data.
