A note on conspicuous leisure, animal spirits and endogenous cycles

Abstract

This paper investigates general equilibrium effects of conspicuous leisure. It finds that leisure externalities reduce the degree of other market imperfections needed to generate indeterminacy or sunspot equilibria - endogneous cycles become empirically more plausible. Sunspot equilibria are possible with a downward-sloping labor demand schedule. The economic reasoning behind the result is that with conspicuous-externalities, labor is drawn more easily in and out of leisure to help fulfill agents expectations.