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Journal Article
Putting home economics into macroeconomics
The implications of adding household production to an otherwise standard real business cycle model are explored in this article. The model developed treats the business and household sectors symmetrically. In particular, both sectors use capital and labor to produce output. The article finds that the household production model can outperform the standard model in accounting for several aspects of U.S. business cycle fluctuations. ; This article is a summary of a chapter prepared for a forthcoming book, Frontiers of Business Cycle Research, edited by Thomas F. Cooley, to be published by ...
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Homework in macroeconomics: household production and aggregate fluctuations
This paper explores some macroeconomic implications of including household production in an otherwise standard real business cycle model. We calibrate the model based on microeconomic evidence and long run considerations, simulate it, and examine its statistical properties Our finding is that introducing home production significantly improves the quantitative performance of the standard model along several dimensions. It also implies a very different interpretation of the nature of aggregate fluctuations.
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Changes in the distribution of family hours worked since 1950
This paper describes trends in average weekly hours of market work per person and per family in the United States between 1950 and 2005. We disaggregate married couple households by skill level to determine if there is a pattern in the hours of work by wives and husbands conditional on either husband's wages or on husband's educational attainment. The wage measure of skill allows us to compare our findings to those of Juhn and Murphy (1997), who report on trends in family labor using a different data set. The educational measure of skill allows us to construct a longer time series. We find ...
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Estimating substitution elasticities in household production models
Dynamic general equilibrium models that include explicit household production sectors provide a useful framework within which to analyze a variety of macroeconomic issues. However, some implications of these models depend critically on parameters, including the elasticity of substitution between market and home consumption goods, about which there is little information in the literature. Using the PSID, we estimate these parameters for single males, single females, and married couples. At least for single females and married couples, the results indicate a high enough substitution elasticity ...
Journal Article
Changes in hours worked, 1950?2000
This article describes changes in the number of average weekly hours of market work per person in the United States since World War II. Overall, this number has been roughly constant; for various groups, however, it has shifted dramatically - from males to females, from older people to younger people, and from single- to married-person households. The article provides a detailed look at how the lifetime pattern of work hours has changed since 1950 for different demographic groups. This article also documents several factors that lead to the reallocation of hours worked across groups: ...
Journal Article
Changes in hours worked since 1950
Changes in hours worked since 1950; This article describes changes in the number of average weekly hours of market work per person in the United States since World War II. Overall, this number has been roughly constant; for various groups, however, it has shifted dramatically from males to females, from older people to younger people, and from single- to married-person households. The article provides a unique look at how the lifetime pattern of work hours has changed since 1950 for different demographic groups. The article also documents several factors that may be related to the changes in ...
Working Paper
Hours and Wages
We document two robust features of the cross-sectional distribution of usual weekly hours and hourly wages. First, usual weekly hours are heavily concentrated around 40 hours, while at the same time a substantial share of total hours come from individuals who work more than 50 hours. Second, mean hourly wages are non-monotonic across the usual hours distribution, with a peak at 50 hours. We develop and estimate a model of labor supply to account for these features. The novel feature of our model is that earnings are non-linear in hours, with the extent of nonlinearity varying over the hours ...
Conference Paper
The macroeconomic transition to high household debt - comments
Working Paper
Hours Worked and Lifetime Earnings Inequality
We document large differences in lifetime hours of work using data from the NLSY79 and argue that these differences are an important source of inequality in lifetime earnings. To establish this we develop and calibrate a rich heterogeneous agent model of labor supply and human capital accumulation that allows for heterogeneity in preferences for work, initial human capital and learning ability, as well as idiosyncratic shocks to human capital throughout the life-cycle. Our calibrated model implies that almost 20 percent of the variance in lifetime earnings is accounted for by differences in ...
Journal Article
Growth and the Kaldor Facts
We revisit the Kaldor growth facts for the United States and the United Kingdom during the postwar period. We find that while overall the original Kaldor facts continue to hold, deviations occurred along several dimensions: Instead of staying constant, the growth rates of real GDP per worker and of real capital per worker have slowed down in the United States and the United Kingdom since the 1970s, the capital-to-output ratio has increased in the United Kingdom, and the share of income paid to labor has decreased in the United States since 1990. We discuss how to calculate the Kaldor facts in ...