ON THE (DE)STABILIZING ROLE OF HETEROGENEITY IN OVERLAPPING GENERATIONS ECONOMIES

A large literature has tried to find conditions such that expectations-driven fluctuations and endogenous cycles appear, but only few articles have focused on the role of consumers' heterogeneity. In our paper, we address this issue by considering an overlapping generations economy with endogenous labor supply. Introducing a variation of heterogeneity, while keeping the mean as constant, we show that a greater or a weaker dispersion does not affect the local dynamics. Therefore, in our framework, the representative agent is a good representation of an heterogeneous population.