Since World War II, direct stock ownership by households has largely been replaced by indirect stock ownership by financial institutions. We argue that tax policy is the driving force. Using long time-series from eight countries, we show that the fraction of household ownership decreases with...

This paper combines income tax returns with Flow of Funds data to estimate the distribution of household wealth in the United States since 1913. We estimate wealth by capitalizing the incomes reported by individual taxpayers, accounting for assets that do not generate taxable income. We...

Within the context of the neoclassical growth model I investigate the implications of (initial) endowment inequality when the rich have a higher marginal savings rate than the poor. More unequal societies grow faster in the transition process, and therefore exhibit a higher speed of convergence....

This paper uses a price-leadership model of the international vanilla market to study the welfare consequences of alternative pricing policies for Madagascar – a country that controls domestic production through a single-channel marketing system and is the leader in the vanilla market....

We develop a simple model to study how relative wage rigidity affects equilibrium taxation. It is argued that relative wage rigidity, by compressing incomes within the middle class, leads to a lower degree of redistributive conflict within the politically important core of society, even though...

Using two unifying models and an empirical exercise, this paper presents and extends the main theories linking income distribution and growth, as well as the relevant empirical evidence. The first model integrates the political-economy and imperfect capital markets theories. It allows for...

We study the earnings structure and the equilibrium assignment of workers when they exert intra-firm spillovers on each other. We allow for arbitrary spillovers provided output depends on some aggregate index of workers' skill. Despite the possibility of increasing returns to skills, equilibrium...

This paper analyses the relationship between technological progress, intergenerational earnings mobility, and economic growth. The analysis demonstrates that the interplay between technological progress and two components that determine individual earnings – parental human capital and...

We analyze the distribution and concentration of market incomes in Germany in the period 1992 to 2001 on the basis of an integrated data set of individual tax returns and the German Socio-Economic Panel. The unique feature of this integrated data set is that it encompasses the whole spectrum of...

This paper studies the effects of progressive income taxes and education finance in a dynamic heterogeneous agent economy. Such redistributive policies entail distortions to labour supply and savings, but also serve as partial substitutes for missing credit and insurance markets. The resulting...