Optimal Job, Consumption, and Portfolio Choice with Multiple Income–Leisure Regimes

We study an infinite-horizon consumption, portfolio, and job-choice problem in which an investor may move costlessly and reversibly among N income–leisure regimes. Job i provides constant labor income Yi and leisure Li, with higher-income jobs offering less leisure. Merely listing N jobs does not imply that all of them are ever selected: an intermediate job can lie below the upper envelope of the relevant dual payoffs and therefore be economically redundant. We formulate a full-activity condition as a strict ordering of adjacent dual intersection points and prove that it is necessary and sufficient for every job to be optimal on a nonempty state interval. When the condition fails, an explicit upper-hull reduction removes the inactive jobs and converts the problem into an equivalent model with a smaller active set. In the complete-market benchmark, the martingale method reduces the mixed control problem to a one-dimensional dual resolvent. The active switching thresholds are explicit, the remaining coefficients follow from a finite transfer recursion, and strong duality yields the optimal consumption, portfolio, wealth, and job policies. Relative to the classical two-job model, the N-job formulation identifies which intermediate occupations survive, how wealth-region widths differ, and when a nominal job menu collapses to fewer effective choices. Numerical exercises report a failure-of-full-activity case, sensitivity analysis, a two-job comparison, and a simulated wealth/job path. The paper is deliberately theoretical and frictionless: it provides a transparent benchmark for richer empirical and structural models rather than statistically testing the wealth–leisure mechanism.

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Publication Details

Journal
Mathematics
Published
2026-08-18
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/math14162976
Primary Topic
Economic theories and models
Type
article
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article

Optimal Job, Consumption, and Portfolio Choice with Multiple Income–Leisure Regimes

Geonwoo Kim, Junkee Jeon
Mathematics
Economic theories and models
article

Optimal Job, Consumption, and Portfolio Choice with Multiple Income–Leisure Regimes

Geonwoo Kim, Junkee Jeon
article en

Abstract

We study an infinite-horizon consumption, portfolio, and job-choice problem in which an investor may move costlessly and reversibly among N income–leisure regimes. Job i provides constant labor income Yi and leisure Li, with higher-income jobs offering less leisure. Merely listing N jobs does not imply that all of them are ever selected: an intermediate job can lie below the upper envelope of the relevant dual payoffs and therefore be economically redundant. We formulate a full-activity condition as a strict ordering of adjacent dual intersection points and prove that it is necessary and sufficient for every job to be optimal on a nonempty state interval. When the condition fails, an explicit upper-hull reduction removes the inactive jobs and converts the problem into an equivalent model with a smaller active set. In the complete-market benchmark, the martingale method reduces the mixed control problem to a one-dimensional dual resolvent. The active switching thresholds are explicit, the remaining coefficients follow from a finite transfer recursion, and strong duality yields the optimal consumption, portfolio, wealth, and job policies. Relative to the classical two-job model, the N-job formulation identifies which intermediate occupations survive, how wealth-region widths differ, and when a nominal job menu collapses to fewer effective choices. Numerical exercises report a failure-of-full-activity case, sensitivity analysis, a two-job comparison, and a simulated wealth/job path. The paper is deliberately theoretical and frictionless: it provides a transparent benchmark for richer empirical and structural models rather than statistically testing the wealth–leisure mechanism.

MathematicsVol. 14(16)
Seoul National University of Science and Technology (KR), Kyung Hee University (KR)
Decent work and economic growth
Openalex Percentile: Top 4%
Economic theories and models
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