Variable Effort, Business Cycles, and Economic Welfare

Minseung Kim; Myungkyu Shim

doi:10.1016/j.econlet.2020.109544

Variable Effort, Business Cycles, and Economic Welfare

Minseung Kim, Myungkyu Shim

Department of Economics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Recent literature has shown that productivity-driven business cycles are beneficial to consumers in the context of market clearing real business cycle model. In this paper, we argue that this notion of welfare-improving business cycles does not jointly satisfy (1) the balanced growth path property and (2) micro evidence on the Frisch labor supply elasticity. We then show that once “variable effort,” a channel that plays an important role in the business cycle frequency but has been ignored by the previous literature on the welfare cost of business cycles, is introduced into the model, welfare-improving business cycles can be achieved in relatively plausible parameter regions.

Original language	English
Article number	109544
Journal	Economics Letters
Volume	196
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2020.109544
Publication status	Published - 2020 Nov

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Names of authors are alphabetically ordered and each author contributes equally to this paper. We would like to thank an anonymous referee and the associate editor (Eric Young) for their valuable comments. Shim acknowledges the financial support from Yonsei University ( Yonsei University Future-leading Research Initiative ( 2020-22-0088 )). Hye Rim Yi provided excellent research assistance.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier B.V.

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

Finance
Economics and Econometrics

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10.1016/j.econlet.2020.109544

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abstract = "Recent literature has shown that productivity-driven business cycles are beneficial to consumers in the context of market clearing real business cycle model. In this paper, we argue that this notion of welfare-improving business cycles does not jointly satisfy (1) the balanced growth path property and (2) micro evidence on the Frisch labor supply elasticity. We then show that once “variable effort,” a channel that plays an important role in the business cycle frequency but has been ignored by the previous literature on the welfare cost of business cycles, is introduced into the model, welfare-improving business cycles can be achieved in relatively plausible parameter regions.",

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Variable Effort, Business Cycles, and Economic Welfare

Abstract

Bibliographical note

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