This paper explores implications of non-separable preferences with home production for international business cycles. Home production induces substitution effects that break the link between market consumption and its marginal utility and help explain several stylized facts of the open economy....

This paper explores the macroeconomic consequences of preferences displaying a subsistence point. It departs from the existing related literature by assuming that subsistence points are specific to each variety of goods rather than to the composite consumption good. We show that this simple...

Empirical research on the permanent income hypothesis (PIH) has found that consumption growth is excessively sensitive to predictable changes in income. This finding is interpreted as strong evidence against the PIH. We propose an explanation for apparent excess sensitivity that is based on a...

This paper analyzes optimal portfolio choice and consumption with stochastic volatility in incomplete markets. Using the Duffie-Epstein (1992) formulation of recursive utility in continuous time, it shows that the optimal portfolio demand for stocks under stochastic volatility varies strongly...

Using a novel source of quasi-experimental variation in interest rates, we develop a new approach to estimating the Elasticity of Intertemporal Substitution (EIS). In the UK, the mortgage interest rate features discrete jumps – notches – at thresholds for the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio. These...

We develop a framework to estimate the aggregate capital-labor elasticity of substitution by aggregating the actions of individual plants, and use it to assess the decline in labor's share of income in the US manufacturing sector. The aggregate elasticity reflects substitution within plants and...

One of the most important behavioral parameters in macroeconomics is the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS). Starting with the seminal work of Hall (1978), researchers haveused an Euler equation framework to estimate the EIS, relating the growth rate of consumption to the after-tax...

This paper develops a new procedure for assessing how well a given dynamic economic model describes a set of economic time series. To answer the question, the variables in the model are augmented with just enough error so that the model can exactly mimic the second moment properties of the...

In this paper, we re-examine the recent evidence that technology shocks do not produce business cycle patterns in the data. We first extend Gal¡'s (1999) work, which uses long-run restrictions to identify technology shocks, by examining whether the identified shocks can be plausibly interpreted...