Can a Representative-Agent Model Represent a Heterogeneous-Agent Economy
发现，用代表性家庭的最优条件解释总就业、消费和实际工资的波动需要与经济直觉不符的偏好。作者构建了一个异质性主体模型，并指出若用虚拟家庭解释模型生成的总时间序列，该家庭必须具有非凹或不稳定的效用函数，这与美国总数据一致。
Accounting for observed fluctuations in aggregate employment, consumption, and real wage using the optimality conditions of a representative household requires preferences that are incompatible with economic priors. In order to reconcile theory with data, we construct a model with heterogeneous agents whose decisions are difficult to aggregate because of incomplete capital markets and the indivisible nature of labor supply. If we were to explain the model-generated aggregate time series using decisions of a stand-in household, such a household must have a nonconcave or unstable utility as is often found with the aggregate US data.