This paper investigates the welfare costs of business cycles in a heterogeneous agent, overlapping generations economy which is distinguished by idiosyncratic labor market risk. Aggregate variation arises both in terms of aggregate productivity shocks and countercyclical variation in the...

We ask how idiosyncratic labor-market risk varies over the business cycle. A difficulty in addressing this question is the limited time-series dimension of existing panel data sets. We address this difficulty by developing a GMM estimator which conditions on the macroeconomic history experienced...

This paper investigates the welfare costs of business cycles in a heterogeneous agent, overlapping generations economy which is distinguished by idiosyncratic labor market risk. Aggregate variation arises both in terms of aggregate productivity shocks and countercyclical variation in the...

What is the effect of non-tradeable idiosyncratic risk on asset-market risk premiums? Constantinides and Duffie (1996) and Mankiw (1986) have shown that risk premiums will increase if the idiosyncratic shocks become more volatile during economic contractions. We add two important ingredients to...

A number of existing studies have concluded that risk sharing allocations supported by competitive, incomplete markets equilibria are quantitatively close to first-best. Equilibrium asset prices in these models have been difficult to distinguish from those associated with a complete markets...

A number of existing studies have concluded that risk sharing allocations supported by competitive, incomplete markets equilibria are quantitatively close to first-best. Equilibrium asset prices in these models have been difficult to distinguish from those associated with a complete markets...