NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Optimal Savings Distortions with Recursive Preferences

Emmanuel Farhi, Iván Werning

NBER Working Paper No. 13720*
Issued in January 2008
NBER Program(s):   EFG    PE

This paper derives an intertemporal optimality condition for economies with private information, focusing on a class of recursive preferences. By comparing it to the situation where agents can freely save in a risk-free asset market, we derive the optimal savings distortions necessary for constrained optimality. Our recursive preferences are homogeneous and satisfy a balanced growth condition, while allowing us to separate the role of risk aversion and intertemporal elasticity of substitution. We perform some quantitative exercises that disentangle the respective roles played by these two parameters play in opt8imal distortions and the implied welfare gains.

*Published: Farhi, Emmanuel & Werning, Iván, 2008. "Optimal savings distortions with recursive preferences," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(1), pages 21-42, January.

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