We study optimal job switching and consumption/investment policies of an economic agent under the borrowing constraints against future labor income in a continuous and infinite time horizon. The agent’s preference is given by the Cobb–Douglas utility function whose arguments are consumption and leisure, and the jobs are characterized by the trade-off between labor income and leisure. We obtain a closed-form solution to the optimization problem by using the martingale and duality method, and investigate theoretical implications of it. The most interesting finding for the optimal job switching policy is that the borrowing constraints in the financial market can decrease the effective flexibility in labor supply of the agent in the labor market. Thus, an environment of the financial market can affect an agent’s decision making in the labor market. We also show how the effects of the borrowing constraints on the optimal consumption/investment policy reinforce or compete with those of the job switching opportunities.
The work of Ho-Seok Lee was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2016R1D1A1B03933406) and by the Research Grant of Kwangwoon University in 2017. The work of Yong Hyun Shin was partially supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) Grant funded by the Korea government (Grant Nos. NRF-2013R1A1A2058027, NRF-2016R1A2B4008240).We are indebted to the anonymous referee and the Associate editor for helpful comments and suggestions. We thank the participants at the Third Asian Quantitative Finance Conference (AQFC) 2015, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 2015, and International Conference on Control Theory and Mathematical Finance, Fudan University, Shanghai, 2015. An earlier version of this paper was circulated under the title: ?An Optimal Job and Consumption/Investment Policy under Borrowing Constraints.?
