| I study about the macroeconomic implication of heterogeneous households. I work on two topics. The first is the relationship between health insurance policy and household bankruptcy. The second is the effect of changes in the composition of unemployed.;Regarding my first topic, I quantitatively explore the macroeconomic and welfare consequences of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and examine the role of consumer bankruptcy in inferring its welfare implication.;I develop a life cycle general equilibrium model in which individuals invest in their health capital. They experience stochastic emergency and non-emergency medical events, the distributions of which depend on individual health capital. The asset market is incomplete, and individual bankruptcy decisions are endogenous in order to capture interactions between income and health. My model replicates various untargeted moments of data in the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS): (i) The poor more frequently visit emergency rooms, compared to the rich, and this gap is disproportionately larger for working age individuals; (ii) The gap in medical conditions between the poor and the rich is substantially amplified over the life cycle; (iii) The poor spend more on healthcare in middle and later life, but the rich pay higher medical expenditures in early life.;Using the model economy, I find that the ACA improves welfare by 0.85 percent of the average consumption. The ACA enhances average health status in the economy, which not only improves welfare directly, but also indirectly through lower earnings and consumption inequality. Despite these positive welfare gains, the model predicts that the ACA increases average bankruptcy rates. While medical bankruptcies for the old fall, non-medical bankruptcies for the young and poor rise due to an increase in the costs of borrowing in general equilibrium.;My second study investigates the effect of compositional change in the pool of job-seeking workers on aggregate unemployment during recessions. According to the Heterogeneity Hypothesis, this compositional effect is large enough to play an important role in the persistence of aggregate unemployment because labor market frictions are different between observable demographic groups.;In order to examine this effect, I build a simple model that is the extension of [45] in the sense that the model features search frictions and labor supply decisions along the extensive margin.;I conduct three experiments to investigate the compositional effect on aggregate unemployment. Firstly, I assume the cyclical labor market frictions that are the same within a gender but different between genders. This may capture both the cyclicality of labor frictions for each worker and the compositional effect. I regard it as my benchmark. Secondly, I fix labor market frictions over time, but they are still different between groups, which might capture the compositional effect. Lastly, all of the individuals have the same labor market frictions, but they are cyclicality, which is regarded as the examination of the effect of the cyclicality for each worker. For each exercise, I obtain the impulse-response function of aggregate unemployment as well as that of other labor market variables.;My result is that the main source of the persistence and cyclicality of aggregate unemployment is the cyclicality of labor market frictions for overall individual workers. Rather, the effect of changes in the pool of unemployed is not large enough to affect aggregate unemployment. |
