Growth and Bubbles with Consumption Externalities

This paper explores the role of consumption externalities in an overlapping generations economy with capital accumulation. If consumers in each generation are concerned with other agentsf consumption behaviors, there exist intergenerational as well as intragenerational consumption externalities. It is the presence of intergenreational consumption externalities that may produce fundamental effects both on equilibrium dynamics and on steady-state characterization of the economy. This paper demonstrates this fact in the context of a simple model of endogenously growing, overlapping-generations economy with or without asset bubbles.