We develop and estimate a general equilibrium search and matching model that accounts for key business cycle properties of macroeconomic aggregates, including labor market variables. In sharp contrast to leading New Keynesian models, we do not impose wage inertia. Instead we derive wage inertia from our specification of how firms and workers negotiate wages. Our model outperforms a variant of the standard New Keynesian Calvo sticky wage model. According to our estimated model, there is a critical interaction between the degree of price stickiness, monetary policy, and the duration of an increase in unemployment benefits.

This paper suggests that adverse selection problems in competitive annuity markets can generate quantity-constrained equilibria in which some agents, whose length of lifetime is uncertain, find it advantageous to accumulate capital privately. This occurs despite the higher rates of return on annuities. The welfare properties of these allocations are analyzed. It is shown that the level of capital accumulation is excessive in a Paretian sense. Policies that eliminate this inefficiency are discussed. Copyright 1987 by University of Chicago Press.

We extend the canonical epidemiology model to study the interaction between economic decisions and epidemics. Our model implies that people cut back on consumption and work to reduce the chances of being infected. These decisions reduce the severity of the epidemic but exacerbate the size of the associated recession. The competitive equilibrium is not socially optimal because infected people do not fully internalize the effect of their economic decisions on the spread of the virus. In our benchmark model, the best simple containment policy increases the severity of the recession but saves roughly half a million lives in the United States.

This paper examines the implications of the absence of complete annuity markets on the distribution of wealth and welfare of agents whose saving decisions are obtained under uncertainty regarding the length of their life. The absence of annuities is shown to yield a unique nondegenerate intragenerational distribution of wealth, which is fully characterized. This characterization is then used to evaluate the Pareto desirability of an annuity system. Alternative welfare criteria that can be used when the proposed change has differential impacts on the initial state of subsequent generations are considered.

This paper investigates empirically a model of aggregate consumption and leisure decisions in which utility from goods and leisure is nontime-separable. The nonseparability of preferences accommodates intertemporal substitution or complementarity of leisure and thereby affects the comovements in aggregate compensation and hours worked. These cross-relations are examined empirically using postwar monthly U. S. data on quantities, real wages, and the real return on the one-month Treasury bill. The estimated values of the parameters governing preferences differ significantly from the values assumed in several studies of real business models. Several possible explanations of these discrepancies are discussed.