Saddle point property and Hopf bifurcation in continuous optimal growth models: a Lagrangian approach

Conditions for saddle point property, and the loss of it, have been widely studied. Generally these properties are established by means of a Hamiltonian formalism; we propose here to work without reference to any Hamiltonian system, and to use only the Lagrangian.

Our study is local; it may seem that no new result can be obtained in this setting; nevertheless we establish sufficient conditions for the loss of saddle point property and for the existence of periodic orbits which, to our knowledge, are not found in the literature.

We take the standard assumption that the Lagrangian is concave. It is well known that the cross derivatives of the Hamiltonian (i.e. H_xp(x, p)) are important in these problems, but the concavity-convexity property of the Hamiltonian does not easily give any information on these derivatives. On the other hand, we obtain such information directly in the Lagrangian version, because the Lagrangian is concave on its two arguments.

We give here a self-contained version of our results and we do not hesitate to re-establish some well-known results, because we believe it is interesting to underline the straightforward aspect of the Lagrangian approach.