Home Production and External Effects on Labor-Augmenting Technological Progress <Articles>

In an economy studied in this paper, the ratio of aggregate home consumption to aggregate market consumption, a proxy to the economy-wide resource allocation between market and home sectors, is assumed to have an external effect, either positive or negative, on the rate of labor-augmenting technological progress. It will be shown that a necessary condition for this model to have multiple steady states depends on relative factor intensity between the two sectors. When home production is more labor-intensive, as suggested by many authors, and when people learn more at home than at market, the long-run outcome might depend on both history and (self-fulfilling) expectation.