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Working Paper

A Note on Sunspots with Heterogeneous Agents

This paper studies sunspot fluctuations in a model with heterogeneous households. We find that wealth inequality reduces the degree of increasing returns needed to produce indeterminacy, while wage inequality increases it. When the model is calibrated to match the joint distribution of hours, income, and wealth, the required degree of increasing returns to scale is still much too high to be supported empirically (although smaller than similar homogeneous agent economies). We also find that the model robustly predicts only one sunspot, despite having 1,262 predetermined state variables.

Working Papers of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment on research in progress. They may not have been subject to the formal editorial review accorded official Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland publications. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or the Federal Reserve System.


Suggested Citation

Carroll, Daniel R., and Eric R. Young. 2009. “A Note on Sunspots with Heterogeneous Agents.” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Working Paper No. 09-06. https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-200906