Can heterogeneous preferences stabilize endogenous fluctuations ?.

While most of the literature concerned with indeterminacy and endogenous cycles is based on the questionable assumption of a representative consumer, some recent works have investigated the role of heterogeneous agents on dynamics. This paper adds a contribution to the debate, highlighting the effects of heterogeneity in consumers' preferences within an overlapping generations economy with capital accumulation, endogenous labor supply and consumption in both periods. Using a mean-preserving approach to heterogeneity, we show that increasing the dispersion of propensities to save turns out to stabilize the macroeconomic volatility, by reducing the range of parameters compatible with indeterminacy and ruling out expectations-driven fluctuations under a sufficiently large heterogeneity.