elasticities of substitution in real business cycle models with home production this paper constructs a simple model of home production that demonstrates the connection between the intertemporal elasticity of substitution in market consumption ies and the static elasticity of substitution between home and market consumption ses understanding this connection is important because there is a large body of empirical evidence suggesting that the ies is small but little evidence on the size of the ses we use our framework to shed light on the properties of a home production model with a low ies we find that such a model must have three fundamental properties in order to match key aspects of aggregate u s data first the steady state growth rate of technology must be the same across sectors second shocks to technology must be sufficiently positively correlated across sectors third capital must be used more intensively in the market sector than in the home sector a home production model with these three properties can be surprisingly successful at reconciling the rbc paradigm with evidence for a low ies

wealth accumulation over the life cycle and precautionary savings this article constructs and simulates a life cycle model of wealth accumulation and estimates the parameters of the utility function the rate of time preference and the coefficient of risk aversion by matching the simulated median wealth profiles with those observed in the panel study of income dynamics and in the survey of consumer finances the estimates imply a low degree of patience and a high degree of risk aversion the results are used to study the importance of precautionary savings in explaining wealth accumulation they imply that wealth accumulation is driven mostly by precautionary motives at the beginning of the life cycle whereas savings for retirement purposes become significant only closer to retirement

wealth distribution in life cycle economies abstract this paper compares the age wealth distribution produced in life cycle economies to the corresponding distribution in the us economy the idea is to calibrate the model economies to match features of the us earnings distribution and then examine the wealth distribution implications of the model economies the findings are that the calibrated model economies with earnings and lifetime uncertainty can replicate measures of both aggregate wealth and transfer wealth in the us furthermore the model economies produce the us wealth gini and a significant fraction of the wealth inequality within age groups however the model economies produce less than half the fraction of wealth held by the top 1 percent of us households

earnings instability and earnings inequality of males in the united states 1967 1991 although much research has focused on recent increases in annual earnings inequality in the united states the increases could have come from either of two sources the distribution of lifetime earnings could have become more unequal or the receipt of lifetime earnings could have become more unstable based on an analysis of the 1968 92 panel study of income dynamics we find that lifetime earnings inequality increased during the early 1980s and that earnings instability increased during the 1970s we also examine how these trends are related to changes in the distribution of wages and hours and the returns to education

rising u s earnings inequality and family labor supply the covariance structure of intrafamily earnings this paper studies the labor supply contributions to individual and family earnings inequality during the period of rising wage inequality in the early 1980 s working couples have positively correlated labor market outcomes which are almost entirely attributable to permanent factors an intertemporal family labor supply model with this feature is used to estimate labor supply elasticities for husbands of 0 05 and wives of 0 40 this implies that labor supply explains little of the rising annual earnings inequality for married men but over 20 percent of the rise in family inequality and 50 percent of the modest rise in female inequality

how important are idiosyncratic shocks evidence from labor supply the notion that individuals face idiosyncratic labor market uncertainty is a common one government programs such as unemployment insurance and social security are motivated by such an idea economic theory ranging from labor supply to savings behavior to asset pricing often presupposes that such risks are important a number of papers however have questioned this orthodoxy sumru altug and robert a miller 1990 for instance are unable to reject a set of factor structure restrictions implied by complete markets john h cochrane 1991 and barbara j mace 1991 find evidence of consumption insurance although not against all types of risks robert m townsend 1994 documents evidence of risk sharing in indian villages michael p keane and kenneth i wolpin 1997 argue that 90 percent of the labor market uncertainty faced by a group of males is resolved by age 16 other studies have suggested the opposite papers by joseph g altonji et al 1991 orazio attanasio and steven j davis 1996 and attanasio and guglielmo weber 1992 as well as some evidence in cochrane 1991 and mace 1991 suggest that risk sharing is far from complete in particular for low frequency shocks angus deaton and christina paxson 1994 show that inequality in labor earnings total income and consumption increases with age they suggest that this is difficult to reconcile with standard models of complete consumption insurance in storesletten et al 2000 we ask similar questions using a general equilibrium life cycle model we conclude that increasing inequality with age consumption inequality in particular is difficult to explain in the absence of uninsured idiosyncratic shocks received throughout the working years we argue that between 40 percent and 50 percent of an individual s lifetime uncertainty remains unresolved prior to entering the workforce this paper further examines the implications of increasing inequality with age we begin by asking if a very different model one which features full risk sharing can account for the data the idea which deaton and paxson 1994 attribute to steven davis is that increasing income and consumption inequality can arise in a perfect insurance setting if i dispersion in labor productivity increases with age and ii preferences are nonseparable between leisure and consumption if this is true an efficient allocation may feature increasing consumption dispersion because higher productivity workers will supply relatively more labor and be compensated with more consumption we develop a specific model and find that for plausible parameter values this is exactly what happens what also happens however is that such an allocation features increasing inequality in hours worked using data from the panel study on income dynamics psid we show that inequality in hours worked is roughly constant across age this casts doubt on the full risksharing model and strengthens the argument in favor of uninsurable idiosyncratic risk the remainder of our paper provides a more general discussion of the evidence on inequality and age and how this suggests an important role for idiosyncratic labor market shocks

education and crime over the life cycle we compare two large scale policy interventions aimed at reducing crime subsidizing high school completion and increasing the length of prison sentences to this purpose we use a life cycle model with endogenous education and crime choices we apply the model to property crime and calibrate it to u s data we find that targeting crime reductions through increases in high school graduation rates entails large efficiency and welfare gains these gains are absent if the same crime reduction is achieved by increasing the length of sentences we also find that general equilibrium effects explain roughly one half of the reduction in crime from subsidizing high school

the labor supply response to mismeasured but predictable wage changes most panel data studies of intertemporal labor supply assume classical measurement error recent validation studies refute this assumption in this study i address nonclassical measurement error explicitly i use data on males from the panel study of income dynamics validation study to purge measurement error from the panel study of income dynamics i find a large amount of predictable wage variation in the data even after allowing for measurement error however there is almost no labor supply response to these predictable wage changes therefore failure to control for nonclassical measurement error cannot explain the low estimated labor supply elasticities in other papers

the evolution of wealth inequality over half a century the role of taxes transfers and technology over the last 50 years the u s tax system went through a striking transformation that reduced the effective tax rates for top income groups and raised transfers to seniors this paper investigates the macroeconomic repercussions of this change in policy particularly for the distributions of income wealth and consumption changes in taxes and transfers account for nearly half of the rise in wealth concentration nonetheless their impact on the distributions of income and consumption has been minor due to changes in equilibrium prices and the offsetting effects of tax cuts and transfers on the dispersion of consumption results highlight the role of increasing wage dispersion during this period as the main driver of trends in inequality

going to college to avoid the draft the unintended legacy of the vietnam war between 1965 and 1975 the enrollment rate of college age men in the united states rose and then fell abruptly many contemporary observers e g james davis and kenneth dolbeare 1968 attributed the surge in college attendance to draft avoidance behavior under a policy first introduced in the korean war the selective service issued college deferments to enrolled men that delayed their eligibility for conscription these deferments provided a strong incentive to remain in school for men who wanted to avoid the draft for example the college entry rate of young men rose from 54 percent in 1963 to 62 percent in 1968 the peak year of the draft moreover both the college entry rate and the number of inductions dropped sharply between 1968 and 1973 as the draft was being phased out although these parallel trends are suggestive they do not necessarily prove that draft avoidance raised the education of men who were at risk of service during the vietnam war such an inference requires an explicit specification of the counterfactual what would have happened to schooling outcomes in the absence of the draft in this paper we use trends in enrollment and completed schooling of men relative to those of women to measure the effects of draftavoidance behavior during the vietnam war our maintained hypothesis is that in the absence of gender specific factors such as the draft the relative schooling outcomes of men and women from the same cohort would follow a smooth trend in light of the sharp discontinuity in military induction rates between 1965 and 1970 we look for similar patterns in the relative enrollment rate of men and in the relative college graduation rate of men from cohorts that were at risk of induction during this period

consumption inequality and intra household allocations the current literature on consumption inequality treats all adults within the household equally making the implicit assumption that all consumption inequality is between not within households however increased marital sorting on earnings and the subsequent rise in the share of women s income in the household may have important implications for consumption inequality measured at the individual level we use an extension of the collective framework of chiappori to estimate a rule for assigning resources to individual household members we then construct a measure of individual level inequality by looking at implied changes in intra household allocations and explore the implications of our framework for the measurement of individual level versus household level consumption inequality our analysis which is based on households comprising one or two adults suggests that the conventional approach of ignoring intra household allocations underestimates the level of cross sectional consumption inequality by 30 and overstates the trend by two thirds our findings also indicate that increases in marital sorting on wages and hours worked can simultaneously explain virtually all of the decline in within household inequality and a substantial fraction of the rise in between household inequality in the uk since the 1970s

u s inequality debt constraints or incomplete asset markets abstract to examine the role of debt constraints and incomplete asset markets lack of insurance markets in explaining u s inequality we run horse races between competing models for a widely used model we decompose inequality into its fundamental driving forces the underlying source of inequality in all models is uninsurable idiosyncratic risk both debt constraints and incomplete asset markets are needed to account for inequality but asset market incompleteness is the key friction it better accounts for the concentration and dispersion of wealth and is the most costly friction in terms of welfare tight debt constraints are important for explaining the lower tail of the wealth distribution

on the distributional effects of reducing capital taxes this article asks whether household heterogeneity and market incompleteness have quantitatively important implications for the welfare effects of tax changes we compare a representative agent economy to an economy in which households face idiosyncratic uninsurable income risk the income process is consistent with empirical estimates and implies a realistic wealth distribution we find that capital tax cuts imply large welfare gains in the representative agent economy however when households are heterogeneous substantial redistribution during transition means that only a minority will support capital tax cuts whereas most households can expect large welfare losses

an operational risk profile the experience of british firms this study provides an analysis of 163 operational loss events experienced by a variety of british firms over the period 1999 2008 10 different hypotheses are tested to examine the distribution of loss severity and frequency with respect to business line event type and corporate entity type we also test hypotheses on the relation between loss severity and the decline in the market value of the announcing firm and whether or not the decline in market value is greater if the loss results from internal fraud the results indicate that loss severity does not depend on firm size that the decline in market value bears no stable relation to the loss amount and that they decline in market value relative to the loss amount is positively related to firm size

two views of inequality over the life cycle data on the life cycle profiles of inequality in wages earnings hours worked and consumption contain precious information for answering questions about the ability of households to insure labor market risk and about the sources of this risk this paper demonstrates that the choice of whether to control for cohort effects or for time effects has a drastic impact on the estimated age profiles for inequality and thus on the answers to those questions it also shows that time effects are required to account of the observed trends in inequality in 30 years of u s data whereas there is no evidence that cohort effects have been important jel c13 d31 d91 j22 j31

evidence on the validity of cross sectional and longitudinal labor market data this article investigates error properties of survey reports of labor market variables we use the panel study of income dynamics psid validation study a two wave panel survey of workers employed by a large firm that shared its detailed payroll records individuals reports of annual earnings are fairly accurate errors are negatively related to true earnings reducing bias due to measurement error when earnings are used as an independent variable biases are moderately larger for changes in earnings earnings per hour are less reliably reported than annual earnings biases in estimating earnings functions are relatively small but those in labor supply functions may be important

trends in the transitory variance of earnings in the united states we decompose the rise in cross sectional variance of male annual earnings in the united states from 1969 to 1996 into permanent and transitory components we find that the variance of permanent earnings began rising in the the late 1970s and has continued to rise in the 1980s the variance of transitory earnings also rose in the 1980s but declined in the 1990s there are lags in the earnings process which require a structural model to pinpoint the exact calendar times at which the changes in trends occurred

changes in the labor supply behavior of married women 1980 2000 using march current population survey data we investigate married women s labor supply from 1980 to 2000 we find a large rightward shift in their labor supply function for annual hours in the 1980s with little shift in the 1990s these shifts account for most of the slowdown in the growth of labor supply during this period a major development was the dramatic decrease in the responsiveness of married women s labor supply to their own and husbands wages their own wage elasticity fell by 50 56 while their cross wage elasticity fell by 38 47 in absolute value

the quiet revolution that transformed women s employment education and family the modern economic role of women emerged in four phases the first three were evolutionary the last was revolutionary phase i occurred from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s phase ii was from 1930 to 1950 phase iii extended from 1950 to the late 1970s and phase iv the quiet revolution began in the late 1970s and is still ongoing three aspects of women s choices distinguish the evolutionary from the revolutionary phases horizon identity and decision making the evolutionary phases are apparent in time series data on labor force participation the revolutionary phase is discernible using time series evidence on women s more predictable attachment to the workplace greater identity with career and better ability to make joint decisions with their spouses each of these series has a sharp break or inflection point signifying social and economic change these changes moreover coincide by birth cohort or period the relationship between the development of modern labor economics and the reality of women s changing economic role is explored the paper concludes by assessing whether the revolution has stalled or is being reversed women who graduated college in the early 1980s did not opt out but recent cohorts are too young to evaluate this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

accounting for the u s earnings and wealth inequality we show that a theory of earnings and wealth inequality based on the optimal choices of ex ante identical households that face uninsured idiosyncratic shocks to their endowments of efficiency labor units accounts for the u s earnings and wealth inequality almost exactly

relative wage movements and the distribution of consumption we analyze how relative wage movements among birth cohorts and education groups affected the distribution of household consumption and economic welfare our empirical work draws on the best available cross sectional data sets to construct synthetic panel data on u s consumption labor supply and wages during the 1980s we find that low frequency movements in the cohort education structure of pretax hourly wages among men drove large changes in the distribution of household consumption the results constitute a spectacular failure of between group consumption insurance a failure not explained by existing theories of informationally constrained optimal consumption behavior a welfare analysis indicates that the cost of between group consumption variability is larger than the cost of aggregate consumption variability by two orders of magnitude

engines of liberation electricity was born at the dawn of the last century households were inundated with a flood of new consumer durables what was the impact of this consumer durable goods revolution it is argued here that the consumer goods revolution was conducive to liberating women from the home to analyse this hypothesis a beckerian model of household production is developed households must decide whether or not to adopt the new technologies and whether a married woman should work can such a model help to explain the rise in married female labour force participation that occurred in the last century yes the housewife of the future will be neither a slave to servants nor herself a drudge she will give less attention to the home because the home will need less she will be rather a domestic engineer than a domestic labourer with the greatest of all handmaidens electricity at her service this and other mechanical forces will so revolutionize the woman s world that a large portion of the aggregate of woman s energy will be conserved for use in broader more constructive fields thomas alva edison as interviewed in good housekeeping magazine lv no 4 october 1912 p 436

child related transfers household labour supply and welfare what are the macroeconomic effects of transfers to households with children how do alternative policies fare in welfare terms we answer these questions in an equilibrium life cycle model with household labour supply decisions skill losses of females associated to non participation and heterogeneity in terms of fertility childcare expenditures and access to informal care calibrating our model to the u s economy we first provide a roadmap for policy evaluation by contrasting transfers that are conditional on market work childcare subsidies and childcare credits with those that are not child credits when both types can be means tested or universal we then evaluate expansions of current arrangements for the u s and find that expansions of conditional transfers have substantial positive effects on female labour supply that are largest at the bottom of the skill distribution expanding childcare credits leads to long run increases in the participation of married females of 10 6 while an equivalent expansion of child credits leads to the opposite 2 4 expanding existing programs generates substantial welfare gains for newborn households which are largest for less skilled households expanding childcare credits leads to the largest welfare gains for newborns and achieves majority support

domestic or global imbalances rising income risk and the fall in the us current account when default leads to exclusion from financial markets the implied loss of consumption smoothing opportunities is more costly when income volatility is high a rise in income risk thus makes default less attractive allowing creditors to relax borrowing limits i show how in an open economy this endogenous financial deepening may reduce aggregate foreign assets in response to a rise in individual income risk against the precautionary savings intuition conditions for this depend on whether default constrains complete or uncontingent contracts the post 1980 rise in us household income risk strongly reduces foreign assets when domestic markets are complete or world interest rates low

insurance and opportunities a welfare analysis of labor market risk abstract using a model with constant relative risk aversion preferences endogenous labor supply and partial insurance against idiosyncratic wage risk this paper provides an analytical characterization of three welfare effects a the welfare effect of a rise in wage dispersion b the welfare gain from completing markets and c the welfare effect from eliminating risk the analysis reveals an important trade off for these welfare calculations on the one hand higher wage uncertainty increases the cost associated with missing insurance markets on the other hand greater wage dispersion presents opportunities to raise aggregate productivity by concentrating market work among more productive workers welfare effects can be expressed in terms of the underlying parameters defining preferences and wage risk or alternatively in terms of changes in observable second moments of the joint distribution over individual wages consumption and hours

static and intertemporal household decisions we discuss the most popular static and dynamic models of household behavior our main objective is to explain which aspects of household decisions different models can account for using this insight we describe testable implications identification results and estimation findings obtained in the literature particular attention is given to the ability of different models to answer various types of policy questions

how important is intra household risk sharing for savings and labor supply abstract while it is recognized that the family is a risk sharing institution little is known about the quantitative effects of this source of insurance on savings and labor supply in this paper we present a model where workers females and males are subject to idiosyncratic employment risk and where capital markets are incomplete a household is formed by a female and a male who decide on consumption savings and labor supplies in a calibrated version of our model we find that intra household risk sharing has its largest impact among wealth poor households while the wealth rich use mainly savings to smooth consumption across unemployment spells wealth poor households rely on spousal labor supply for instance for low wealth households average hours worked by wives of unemployed husbands are 8 higher than those worked by wives of employed husbands this response in wives hours makes up 9 of lost family income we also study consumption losses upon an unemployment spell precautionary savings and the crowding out effects of the public unemployment insurance program on the extent of risk sharing within the household

income and wealth heterogeneity in the macroeconomy how do movements in the distribution of income and wealth affect the macroeconomy we analyze this question using a calibrated version of the stochastic growth model with partially uninsurable idiosyncratic risk and movements in aggregate productivity our main finding is that in the stationary stochastic equilibrium the behavior of the macroeconomic aggregates can be almost perfectly described using only the mean of the wealth distribution this result is robust to substantial changes in both parameter values and model specification our benchmark model whose only difference from the representative agent framework is the existence of uninsurable idiosyncratic risk displays far less cross sectional dispersion and skewness in wealth than u s data however an extension that relies on a small amount of heterogeneity in thrift does succeed in replicating the key features of the wealth data furthermore this extension features aggregate time series that depart significantly from permanent income behavior

the macroeconomic implications of rising wage inequality in the united states in recent decades american workers have faced a rising college premium a narrowing gender gap and increasing wage volatility this paper explores the quantitative and welfare implications of these changes the framework is an incomplete markets life cycle model in which individuals choose education intrafamily time allocation and savings given the observed history of the u s wage structure the model replicates key trends in cross sectional inequality in hours worked earnings and consumption recent cohorts enjoy welfare gains on average as higher relative wages for college graduates and for women translate into higher educational attainment and a more even division of labor within the household

consumption inequality and income uncertainty this paper places the debate over using consumption or income in studies of inequality growth in a formal intertemporal setting it highlights the importance of permanent and transitory income uncertainty in the evaluation of growth in consumption inequality we derive conditions under which the growth of variances and covariances of income and consumption can be used to separately identify the growth in the variance of permanent and transitory income shocks household data from britain for the period 1968 1992 are used to show a strong growth in transitory inequality toward the end of this period while younger cohorts are shown to face significantly higher levels of permanent inequality

demand shocks and open economy puzzles abstract we pose good markets frictions on top of an otherwise standard two country international real business cycle irbc model shopping for goods takes effort which prevents perfect matching between customers and producers an increase in search effort implies increased measured productivity demand shocks increase expenditures and search effort simultaneously increasing output consumption productivity and the trade deficit and appreciating the real exchange rate thus we solve the backus smith puzzle and we show that the cross country correlation of consumption is higher than that of output standard irbc models cannot account for these puzzles along with movements in tfp

the evolution of individual male earnings in great britain 1975 95 i study the dynamic structure of male wages in great britain using the new earnings survey panel from 1975 95 computing auto covariances of individual wages by cohort i find evidence of a permanent component of earnings that increases over the life cycle and a highly persistent serially correlated transitory component in addition the estimated variances of both these components have risen over this period each explaining about half the rise in inequality using individual s occupation at age 22 i split the sample into four skill groups i find some differences across these groups with the rise in the permanent variance most important for the manual groups

insurance and opportunities the welfare implications of rising wage dispersion this paper develops a series of heterogeneous agents economies in order to characterize analytically the welfare implications of changes in the uncertainty in individual labor productivity we perform two types of welfare calculations first we compute the welfare consequences of a rise in labor market risk given a particular asset market structure complete markets incomplete markets autarky second we compute the expected gain from completing markets starting from autarky or incomplete markets for a given level of wage dispersion we are able to derive intuitive closed form expressions for these welfare eects which depend only on preference parameters and the size of the change in wage dispersion a higher level of productivity dispersion has always two eects it tends to reduce welfare in presence of partial insurance but it also tends to improve production opportunities in presence of flexible labor supply we can separate analytically the insurance and the opportunity components we quantify the welfare consequences of the rise in wage inequality observed in the united states over the past three decades as roughly 3 of lifetime consumption moreover we calculate that completing the asset markets given the current level of inequality would lead to a welfare improvement equivalent to 35 of lifetime consumption

wage risk and employment risk over the life cycle we specify a structural life cycle model of consumption labour supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions that allows us to distinguish between different sources of risk and to estimate their effects the sources of risk are shocks to productivity job destruction the process of job arrival when employed and unemployed and match level heterogeneity our model allows for four main social insurance programmes in contrast to simpler models that attribute all income fluctuations to shocks our framework allows us to disentangle the effects of the shocks from the responses to these shocks estimates of productivity risk once we control for employment risk and for individual labour supply choices are substantially lower than estimates that attribute all wage variation to productivity risk increases in productivity risk impose a considerable welfare loss on individuals and induce substantial precautionary saving increases in employment risk have large effects on output and primarily through this channel affect welfare the welfare value of government programs such as food stamps which partially insure productivity risk is greater than the value of unemployment insurance which provides partial insurance against employment risk and no insurance against persistent shocks

two birds with one stone female labor supply fertility and market childcare abstract the correlation between the female labor force participation rate fpr and the total fertility rate tfr has switched from negative to positive in some developed countries in this paper we show how increasing the substitutability between maternal time and market childcare can raise both fpr and tfr and provide an explanation for the change in the tfr fpr correlation simulations of a life cycle model of married women s work and fertility decisions indicate that the fpr increases whereas the tfr is u shaped with regard to substitutability the dynamic relationship depends on the relative strength of behavioral and composition effects greater substitutability allows working women to have more children but it also attracts less productive women to enter the labor force who trade childbirths for labor supply the findings imply that raising substitutability to a sufficiently high level can achieve the two seemingly conflicting goals increasing female labor force participation and fertility rates

income risk macroeconomic and demographic change and economic inequality in japan abstract using an olg model with heterogeneous households we investigate the relationship among income risk macroeconomic and demographic changes and economic inequality between 1980 and 2000 in japan by decomposing the primary factors in earnings and consumption inequality into macroeconomic variables and the demographic variable we find that our model replicates the evolution of economic inequality in japan by performing counterfactual simulations we demonstrate that two factors changes in time varying macroeconomic factors and the unexpected decline in the total factor productivity growth rate played important roles in the increase in earnings and consumption inequality in the 1990s

testing the neoclassical model of family labor supply and fertility the mcelroy horney nash bargaining model of family demand behavior relaxes the restriction that nonearned income of husband and wife has the identical effect on family labor supply and commodity demands this restriction of the neoclassical model offamily behavior is tested for the determination of husband and wife labor supply andfertility based on the 1981 socioeconomic survey of thailand the neoclassical restriction is rejected for female labor supply andfertility another unexplored limitation offamily demand studies due to the sample self selection of intact marriages is empirically treated through alternative estimation strategies in this case a more sharply focused theory of marital behavior is needed to identify family demand models

families as shocks in this paper we show the quantitative importance of the process that determines changes in family composition to determine the main macroeconomic magnitudes we do so by modelling family type as a stochastic process that affects households in a way similar to shocks to earnings agents respond to these process by optimally choosing savings we show that the size of savings differs dramatically depending on the details of the stochastic process the model is quantitative its fundamental parameters are estimated using u s data

from earnings inequality to consumption inequality this paper studies the paths from inequality in earnings to inequality in household consumption we show that careful study of the evolution of the variances and covariances of earnings and consumption within cohorts across time can identify permanent and transitory shocks we present an application to the evolution of inequality in the united kingdom we extend previous results to recognise separate earnings of partners in couples

consumption and risk sharing over the life cycle a striking feature of u s data on income and consumption is that inequality increases with age this paper asks if individual specific earnings risk can provide a coherent explanation we find that it can we construct an overlapping generations general equilibrium model in which households face uninsurable earnings shocks over the course of their lifetimes earnings inequality is exogenous and is calibrated to match data from the u s panel study on income dynamics consumption inequality is endogenous and matches well data from the u s consumer expenditure survey the total risk households face is decomposed into that realized before entering the labor market and that realized throughout the working years in welfare terms the latter is found to be more important than the former

cost of business cycles with indivisibilities and liquidity constraints it is almost universally agreed that individuals face incomplete insurance markets and cannot perfectly insure against the idiosyncratic risk in this paper simple general equilibrium models with incomplete insurance markets are examined in order to assess the impact of imperfect insurance on the magnitude of the welfare costs of business cycles two versions of incomplete insurance markets are considered and certain statistical properties of the equilibrium stochastic processes in these environments are compared with those of a perfect insurance economy

the risk free rate in heterogeneous agent incomplete insurance economies abstract why has the average real risk free interest rate been less than one percent the question is motivated by the failure of a class of calibrated representative agent economies to explain the average return to equity and risk free debt i construct an economy where agents experience uninsurable idiosyncratic endowment shocks and smooth consumption by holding a risk free asset i calibrate the economy and characterize equilibria computationally with a borrowing constraint of one year s income the resulting risk free rate is more than one percent below the rate in the comparable representative agent economy

life cycle economies and aggregate fluctuations do the implications for business cycle issues change when we switch from studying infinitely lived representative agent models to more sophisticated demographic structures with finitely lived agents this article addresses that question by using a large overlapping generations model that is calibrated to u s demographic properties microeconomic evidence and national income and product accounts the finding is that the answers obtained are basically the same for the two kinds of models the article also explores the relative volatility of hours across age groups an issue that cannot be addressed by using the infinitely lived representative agent abstraction

sorting and long run inequality many social commentators have raised concerns over the possibility that increased sorting in society may lead to greater inequality to investigate this we construct a dynamic model of intergenerational education acquisition fertility and marital sorting and parameterize the steady state to match several basic empirical endings we end that increased sorting will signiecantly increase income inequality four factors are important to our endings a negative correlation between fertility and education a decreasing marginal effect of parental education on children s years of education wages that are sensitive to the relative supply of skilled workers and borrowing constraints that affect educational attainment for some low income households

income and outcomes a structural model of intrahousehold allocation there is evidence from several sources that one cannot treat many person households as a single decision maker if this is the case then factors such as the relative incomes of the household members may affect the final allocation decisions made by the household we develop a method of identifying how incomes affect outcomes given conventional family expenditure data the basic assumption we make is that household decision processes lead to efficient outcomes we apply our method to a sample of canadian couples with no children we find that the final allocations of expenditures on each partner depend significantly on their relative incomes and ages and on the level of lifetime wealth

income variance dynamics and heterogeneity recent theoretical work has shown the importance of measuring microeconomic uncertainty for models of both general and partial equilibrium under imperfect insurance in this paper the assumption of i i d income innovations used in previous empirical studies is removed and the focus of the analysis is placed on models for the conditional variance of income shocks which is related to the measure of risk emphasized by the theory we first discriminate amongst various models of earnings determination that separate income shocks into idiosyncratic transitory and permanent components we allow for education and time specific differences in the stochastic process for earnings and for measurement error the conditional variance of the income shocks is modelled as a parsimonious arch process with both observable and unobserved heterogeneity the empirical analysis is conducted on data drawn from the 1967 1992 panel study of income dynamics we find strong evidence of sizeable arch effects as well as evidence of unobserved heterogeneity in the variances