This paper investigates the welfare costs of business cycles in a heterogeneous agent, overlapping generations economy which is distinguished by idiosyncratic labor market risk. Aggregate variation arises both in terms of aggregate productivity shocks and countercyclical variation in the...

This paper investigates the welfare costs of business cycles in a heterogeneous agent, overlapping generations economy which is distinguished by idiosyncratic labor market risk. Aggregate variation arises both in terms of aggregate productivity shocks and countercyclical variation in the...

O'Connell and Zeldes (1993) have shown that the dynamic inefficiency result of a standard gift model is reversed if parents can undersave strategically. I impose an explicit non-negativity constraint on gifts, which - for all numerical examples suggested by O'Connell and Zeldes - alters this...