Overtime, effort and the propagation of business cycle shocks

This paper presents and estimates a variant of Hansen and Sargent's (1988) real business cycle model with straight time and overtime. The model presented has only one latent variable, the state of technology, yet it does a better job propagating and magnifying shocks than the labor hoarding models which incorporate unobserved effort. This model, as well as a version of Burnside, Eichenbaum and Rebelo's (1993) labor hoarding model, is estimated using maximum likelihood. The maximum likelihood parameter estimates are compared to those using GMM.