DP13006 Macroeconomics with Heterogeneous Agents and Input-Output Networks

Author(s):	David Rezza Baqaee, Emmanuel Farhi
Publication Date:	June 2018
Date Revised:	December 2018
Keyword(s):	aggregation, comovement, Heterogeneous Agents, production networks, propagation
JEL(s):
Programme Areas:	Monetary Economics and Fluctuations, Macroeconomics and Growth
Link to this Page:	cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=13006

The goal of this paper is to simultaneously unbundle two interacting reduced-form building blocks of traditional macroeconomic models: the representative agent and the aggregate production function. We introduce a broad class of disaggregated general equilibrium models with Heterogeneous Agents and Input-Output networks (HA-IO). We characterize their properties through two sets of results describing the propagation and the aggregation of shocks. Our results shed light on many seemingly disparate applied questions, such as: sectoral comovement in business cycles; factor-biased technical change in task-based models; structural transformation; the effects of corporate taxation; and the dependence of fiscal multipliers on the composition of government spending.