Reexamination of Economic Growth, Tax Policy, and Distributive Politics

The paper examines the relationship between economic growth, tax policy, and distribution of capital and labor ownership in a one‐sector political‐economy model of endogenous growth with productive government spending financed by a proportional tax on capital income. The analysis shows that inequality in wealth and income can be positively or negatively related to the optimal tax rate. In either environment, higher inequality leads to a lower after‐tax return to capital, thereby reducing the economy's growth rate.     

Growth, income distribution, and fiscal policy volatility

The relationship between income distribution and economic growth has long been an important economic research subject. Despite substantial evidence on the negative impact on long-term growth of inequality in the literature, however, there is not much consensus on the specific channels through which inequality affects growth. The empirical validity of two most prominent political economy channels - redistributive fiscal spending and taxes, and sociopolitical instability - has recently been challenged. We advance a new political economy channel for the negative link between inequality and growth, a fiscal policy volatility channel, and present strong supporting econometric evidence in a large sample of countries over the period of 1960-2000. Our finding also sheds light on another commonly observed negative relation between macroeconomic volatility and growth. We carefully address the robustness of the results in terms of data, estimation methods, outlier problem, and endogeneity problem that often plague the standard OLS (ordinary least squares) regression.     

Inequality,Redistribution, and the Financial Crisis: Evidence from Distributional National Accounts for Austria

In this paper, we provide novel findings regarding the distributional effects of the global financial and economic crisis and how redistribution operated during this time, using detailed data for Austria. We construct distributional national accounts for the period 2004–2016 by combining survey data, tabulated tax data, and detailed national accounts data. The comprehensive data set allows us to analyze the distribution of macroeconomic income growth across the income distribution and to explore the evolution of income inequality over time. Our results suggest that as the distribution of growth changed over time, this had considerable repercussions for inequality, which started to decline at the very beginning of the economic and financial crisis, but increased again after 2012. We find that capital income largely determined both the level and the dynamics of income inequality. Government spending was found to play a key role for redistributive effects across the income distribution. In particular, in-kind transfers redistributed pre-tax income to a large extent. Our results show further that individuals with lower educational levels and younger individuals faced negative growth in pre-tax income over the years and also benefited considerably from redistribution.     

Inequality,unemployment, and endogenous growth in a political economy with a minimum wage

This paper presents development of an endogenous growth model with heterogeneous households and political determination of the minimum wage. We investigate the interaction of inequality, unemployment, and economic growth. First, the arguments in this paper show that a positive correlation exists between inequality and unemployment, Second, the interaction between inequality and economic growth is shown to be a positive relation if high inequality pertains in a society. It is a negative relation if low inequality pertains.      

Welfare-improving government behavior and inequality in a heterogeneous agents model

Government’s behavior is expected to be non-neutral in terms of impacts on both welfare and inequality. It is acknowledged in most literature that fiscal policy often involves trade-offs between economic growth and inequality.By applying an equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents, capable of exploring the relationship between fiscal policy variables and the endogenous cross-section distribution of income, wealth, consumption and leisure, this paper aims at assessing (i) the optimal menu of government expenditures as well as of (ii) their inter-temporal financing. These are key issues in times of fiscal imbalances and their correction is dominating the current (European) policy agenda.     

Income distribution and redistribution through taxation: An international comparison

Income tax progressivity is studied with Generalized Entropy measures of inequality. Luxembourg Income Study data sets for nine countries are used for international comparison and analysis. progressivity indices are generated by using the Generalized Entropy family as well as Atkinson measures. We further our understanding by examining pre-tax and post-tax measures of inequality based respectively on gross and disposable household incomes. The decomposition property is shown to be desirable for enhancing our knowledge of income inequality and the redistributive effect of income taxes. Thus decomposition based on family size and number of earners is conducted. We learn that countries vary in their emphasis regarding redistributive effects of income taxes.     

Fiscal Policy and Equitable Growth

This paper continues the study of optimal fiscal policy in a growing economy by exploring a case in which the government simultaneously provides three main categories of expenditures with distortionary tax finance: public production services, public consumption services, and state-contingent redistributive transfers. The paper shows that in a general-equilibrium model with given exogenous fiscal policy, a nonmonotonic relation exists between the suboptimal long-run growth rate in a competitive economy and distortionary tax rates. When fiscal policy is endogenously chosen at a social optimum, the relation between the rate of growth and tax rates is always negative. These two properties suggest that an alternative set of government policy instruments affects the response of private sector investment to fiscal policy. Moreover, the different properties of exogenous and endogenous fiscal policy theoretically account for the difference in the relation between economic growth and fiscal policy in empirical studies.     

Relative deprivation,wealth inequality and economic growth

This paper presents an endogenous growth model where utility depends on relative deprivation as well as consumption. It is shown that a negative relationship exists between wealth inequality and equilibrium growth rate. In addition, if the concern for relative deprivation is strong enough, instantaneous utility decreases while aggregate income increases.      

Redistributive Tax and Growth in a Model with Discrete Occupational Choice

An optimal redistributive tax-subsidy formula is derived for a growth model where income inequality is endogenously driven by an adult's choice of occupation between work and management. Investment in human capital is the engine of growth. The world's stock of exploitable knowledge as well as the economy's average human capital determine the potential rate of return from investment in human capital in an economy. How much available knowledge would be exploited in the economy depends on the proportion of innovators in our model. A redistributive tax reform impacts growth as well as income inequality via its influence over the occupational choice. The optimal redistributive tax rate is path-dependent in the sense that it depends on the initial wealth distribution. The normative implication of the model is that the optimal capital income tax rate could very well be positive if the initial wealth inequality exceeds a threshold. The optimal capital income tax rate depends inversely on the initial wealth inequality.     

Redistribution,inequality, and growth: new evidence

We investigate the relationship between inequality, redistribution, and growth using a recently-compiled dataset that distinguishes clearly between market (pre-tax and transfer) and net (post tax and transfer) inequality, and allows us to calculate redistributive transfers for a large number of advanced and developing countries. Across a variety of estimation methods, data samples, and robustness checks, we find: (1) lower net inequality is robustly correlated with faster and more durable growth, controlling for the level of redistribution; (2) redistribution appears benign in terms of its impact on growth, except when it is extensive; and (3) inequality seems to affect growth through human capital accumulation and fertility channels.     

Wealth inequality,governance and economic growth

Links between economic growth and inequality are of growing interest for researchers and policy makers. Previous studies of this relationship have focused mainly on inequalities in income rather than in wealth. Yet from many perspectives wealth inequality is arguably more important. Using a new panel data set from Credit Suisse for 45 sample countries over the period 2000–2012, this study investigates the effects of wealth inequality on economic growth. Empirical results from system GMM estimation suggest that the wealth inequality is negatively associated with cross-country economic growth. This result is robust to alternative estimators and measures of wealth inequality, as well as the econometric specification. Further empirical investigation reveals that impact of wealth inequality on growth is mitigated by better governance.     

Demography, growth, and inequality

We extend the single-sector endogenous growth model to allow for a general demographic structure. The model shows that due to the “generational turnover term,” the equilibrium growth rate is less than that of a representative agent model. We find the local dynamics about the balanced growth path (bgp) to be unstable, implying that the bgp is the only viable equilibrium. Using numerical simulations, we analyze how economic consequences of a change in the population growth rate differ, depending on the source of the demographic change. In addition, we analyze the relationship between changes in the demographic structure and what we call the “natural rate of wealth inequality”. Finally, we use our model to study how the demographic transition experienced by the United States has affected the economic growth rate and the degree of wealth inequality.     

Social conflict and growth

Despite the predictions of the neoclassical theory of economic growth, we observe that poor countries have invested at lower rates and have not grown faster than rich countries. To explain these empirical regularities we provide a game-theoretic model of conflict between social groups over the distribution of income. Among all possible equilibria, we concentrate on those that are on the constrained Pareto frontier. We study how the level of wealth and the degree of inequality affects growth. We show how lower wealth can lead to lower growth and even to stagnation when the incentives to domestic accumulation are weakened by redistributive considerations.     

How does wealth distribution affect firm's incentive to innovate better quality goods?

The paper contributes to the literature relating to inequality and economic growth, in particular, we investigate the effects of wealth distribution on the kind of growth driven by innovation, i.e. Schumpeterian growth. Since two types of individuals are assumed, the poor and the rich, Gini-coefficient is treated in two variables, namely the relative wealth of the poor and the population share of the poor, each having a different effect on economic performance. Particularly in the separating equilibrium, an improvement in the relative wealth of the poor impedes economic growth, but a decline in the population share of the poor enhances economic growth. Furthermore, the current paper combines the Schumpeterian quality improvement model and the neoclassic production function. Thus, the impact of wealth inequality on economic growth is through the supply of human capital as well as the demand for better quality goods. Our results suggest that empirical research on the base of Gini-coefficient cannot generate a general relationship between wealth inequality and economic growth.     

Public goods provision,inequality and taxes

The impact of redistributive policies on voluntary contributions is still not well understood. While a higher level of redistributive taxation decreases the price of voluntary giving, it also changes the income distribution by decreasing income inequality. This paper provides a controlled laboratory experiment to investigate the net impact of the tax rate on public goods provision. The experimental findings show that while the participants decrease their voluntary contributions as the pre-tax income distribution becomes more equal, they increase their contributions with taxation. These findings have important implications for government policies regarding privately provided public goods.     

Estimating the long-run relationship between income inequality and economic development

There are several theories describing the effect of income inequality on economic growth. These theories usually predict that there exists some optimal, steady-state growth path between inequality and development. This study uses a new measure of income distribution and panel data cointegration methods to test for the existence of such a steady-state equilibrium relation. It is shown that there is a long-run equilibrium relationship between the variables, and that this relationship is negative in developed economies.     

Competition,taxation and economic growth

The paper mainly examines the relationship between economic growth, tax policy and sectoral labor distribution in an endogenous growth model with expanding varieties. For analyzing these relationships, we consider an economy where three sectors of production are vertically integrated: final goods sector, intermediate goods sector and research sector. We show that the extent of imperfect competition in the intermediate products market affects both economic growth and the allocation of the available labor to all the sectors employing this input. The resources from capital taxation, which are used for financing research sector, have a U-shaped effect on growth and lead to a movement of the labor from research sector to final goods sector. Additionally, we show that if there exists a higher competitive structure in an economy, the probability of the positive effect of an increase in tax on growth gets higher.     

税收、财政支出与内生经济增长

构建了基于财政支出、税收的内生经济增长模型,并推导出在给定税收、财政支出政策的变化路径时,经济会达到"竞争性分散均衡",税率与经济增长存在"倒-U"型关系,政府投资性支出与经济增长之间正相关。利用中国省际面板数据进行实证检验显示,在我国经济运行中,总产出、消费、投资、政府投资性支出、税率、利息率、工资水平之间存在长期均衡关系。我国宏观税率为28.63%时达到最优值,政府投资性支出对经济增长率存在正向影响,但不同区域间存在较大差异性。     

Endogenous (re-)distributive policies and economic growth: A comparative static analysis

This paper analyzes the interplay of economic growth, (re-)distribution and policies when the latter are set exogenously or when they depend on economically important fundamentals. A redistribution policy generally causes lower growth, but less so when economic efficiency is higher. The model implies that high (endogenous) tax rates may not necessarily imply low growth. The paper shows that the long-run cross-country relationship between growth and endogenous policy is generally not clear-cut. But it is shown that this relies on conditions that can be used for identification in empirical research. The paper also argues that in the long run workers benefit more from higher efficiency than capital owners, even though inequality might and growth would rise.     

Wealth Dynamics and the Endogenous Design of Firm Organization

The purpose of this paper is to explore a dynamic interaction between wealth distribution and firm organization design using a model of growth in altruism in which a consideration of moral hazard on the part of agents with risk-averse preferences prevents complete insurance and generates inequality. I show (i) that there exists an ergodic invariant distribution of wealth to which the stochastic process of lineage wealth converges globally, and (ii) that the firm form with direct evaluation of the agent's effort is more likely to be chosen as wealth is distributed more equally.