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Precautionary Savings or Working Longer Hours?

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  • Josep Pijoan-Mas

Abstract

This paper quantifies the size of precautionary savings implied by a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents when explicitly considering the labor supply decision of households. I find that precautionary savings are smaller than if they were measured by use of a model economy without labor decision and that they can even be negative. In addition, the incomplete markets economy is smaller in size than its complete markets counterparts: aggregate output in the incomplete markets economy is between 82% and 94% of aggregate output in the complete markets economies. These result are in stark contrast to the ones implied by models without labor choice and are due to the importance of hours as a mechanism to confront wage fluctuations

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  • Josep Pijoan-Mas, 2004. "Precautionary Savings or Working Longer Hours?," 2004 Meeting Papers 350, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    • Handle: RePEc:red:sed004:350
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Incomplete Markets; Precautionary Savings; Labor Supply;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • J22 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Time Allocation and Labor Supply

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