The main goal of this paper is to measure the welfare costs of business cycles in a production economy in which the representative agent has low risk aversion and - at the same time - the equity premium and the co-movements of aggregate quantities and market returns are comparable to what...

Standard business cycle models with state-additive preferences, while broadly consistent with the behavior of real macroeconomic aggregates, are unable to generate asymmetries between expansions and recessions, and are also inconsistent with the behavior of asset prices. In this paper we exploit...