Precautionary Saving over the Business Cycle

We study the macroeconomic implications of time-varying precautionary saving within a general equilibrium model with borrowing constraint and both aggregate shocks
and uninsurable idiosyncratic unemployement risk. Our framework generates limited cross-sectional household heterogeneity as an equilibrium outcome, thereby making it possible to analyse the role of precautionary saving over the business cycle in an analytically tractable way. The time-series behaviour of aggregate consumption generated by our model is much closer to the data than that implied by the comparable hand-to-mouth and representative-agent models, and comparable to that produced by the (intractable) Krusell-Smith (1998) model.