³⁶We could of course model age effects directly, but it is precisely the inclusion of such realism that has made OLG models unpopular for business cycle modeling; they are too unwieldy to use for many practical research purposes and (perhaps more important) it is too difficult distill their mechanics into readily communicable insights. Our view is that, for business cycle analysis purposes, the only thing of substance that is gained in exchange for many different kinds of extra complexity is a widening of the distribution of wealth-to-income ratios. We achieve such a widening transparently and parsimoniously by incorporating discount factor heterogeneity.