The absence of a trend in hours worked in the postwar United States is an exception: across countries and historically, hours fall steadily by a little below 0.5% per year. Are steadily falling hours consistent with a stable utility function over consumption and leisure under balanced growth of the macroeconomic aggregates? Yes. We fully characterize the class of such functions and thus generalize the well-known “balanced-growth preferences” that demand constant (as opposed to falling) long-run hours. Key to falling hours is an income effect (of steady productivity growth on hours) that slightly outweighs the substitution effect.

We use new, comprehensive micro data on oil fields to build and estimate a structural model of the oil industry embedded in a general equilibrium model of the world economy. In the model, firms that belong to Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) act as a cartel. The remaining firms are a competitive fringe. We use the model to study the macroeconomic impact of the advent of fracking. Fracking weakens the OPEC cartel, leading to a large long-run decline in oil prices. Fracking also reduces the volatility of oil prices in the long run because fracking firms can respond more quickly to changes in oil demand.

We investigate the welfare properties of the one-sector neoclassical growth model with uninsurable idiosyncratic shocks. We focus on the notion of constrained efficiency used in the general equilibrium literature. Our characterization of constrained efficiency uses the first-order condition of a constrained planner’s problem. This condition highlights the margins of relevance for whether capital is too high or too low: the factor composition of income of the (consumption-) poor. Using three calibrations commonly considered in the literature, we illustrate that there can be either over- or underaccumulation of capital in steady state and that the constrained optimum may or may not be consistent with a nondegenerate long-run distribution of wealth. For the calibration that roughly matches the income and wealth distribution, the constrained inefficiency of the market outcome is rather striking: it has much too low a steady-state capital stock.