Macroeconomics with Heterogeneous Agents and Input-Output Networks

Abstract

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.