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....

We explore how the underemployment problem of less-developed economies is related to income inequality. Our crucial assumption is that consumers have non-homothetic preferences over differentiated products of formal-sector goods and thus that inequality affects the composition of aggregate...

The paper analyses how equilibrium adjustments of the wage rate affect the scope for tax rate reductions when the government experiences an exogenous increase in non-tax revenues. It shows within a stylized model that increased revenue in the form of a tradable will increase the wage rate, which...

In conducting economic policy, governments generally face conflicts in various objectives, e.g. between efficiency and equity. In Norway, one objective of energy politics has been to reduce electricity consumption, and several tax increases have been proposed. Whether this objective may be in...

We estimate the welfare costs of inflation originating from lack of liquidity satiation - as in Bailey (1956), Friedman (1969), Lucas (2000), and Ireland (2009) - for the U.S., U.K., Canada, and three countries/economic areas (Switzerland, Sweden, and the Euro area) in which interest rates have...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the perceived fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a two-period model of individual life-time utility maximization, we predict that persons with higher perceived...

In this paper, we investigate how de facto financial globalization has influenced the labor share in developing countries. Our main argument is the need to distinguish between different types of capital in this context, as different forms of foreign investment have different fixed costs and...

The main goal of the Norwegian pension reform of 2011 is to improve long run fiscal sustainability, not least through stronger labour supply incentives. We assess to what extent the reform is likely to live up to these intentions. To this end we combine a dynamic microsimulation model, which...

It is shown that if social welfare is the sum of logaritmic utility function, the optimal income distribution and the welfare effect of any income redistribution is independet of the equivalence scales. In optimum all households have the same per capita income. Based on this observation it is...

This paper focuses on the measurement of progressivity and the distributional effect of the Norwegian tax reform of 1992. Progressivity is measured by the degree of disproportionality, which implies that the burden of taxes is estimated when income units are ranked according to pre-tax incomes....