Sharing Economy in Macroeconomics: Collaborative Consumption and Durable Goods

This paper studies the implications of the sharing or collaborative economy on the rest of the economy. During the last decade, the so-called collaborative economy has experienced an intensive process of expansion, mainly in certain tourism and transport services, by renting household durables stock excess capacity. Technological progress and the development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have removed barriers to market access and information constraints, which provides households with a marketplace to rent goods and services produced by using household capital. In this paper we propose a general equilibrium theoretical framework within which to study the collaborative economy sector, together with both the market production and household production sectors. Our model considers that production within the collaborative economy falls between market production and domestic production, and combines some features of both environments, but di¤ers in others. We found that a positive neutral technological shock to market production has a positive impact on the accumulation of durable goods, consistent with the data. By contrast, a positive productivity shock to the sharing economy sector reduces durables investment and increases business capital investment. Finally, an investment-speci?c technological shock to durables has a positive e¤ect on household capital but a negative one on business capital.