An Equilibrium Model of the Business Cycle with Household Production and Fiscal Policy.

The authors estimate a dynamic general equilibrium model of the U.S. economy that includes an explicit household production sector and stochastic fiscal variables. They use their estimates to investigate two issues. First, the authors analyze how well the model accounts for aggregate fluctuations. They find that household production has a significant impact and reject a nested specification in which changes in the home production technology do not matter for market variables. Second, the authors study the effects of some simple fiscal policy experiments and show that the model generates different predictions for the effects of tax changes than similar models without home production. Copyright 1997 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.