A significant amount of the increase in the wealth income ratio in recent decades is due to an increase in the value of land. We present a series of models that explain why land prices may have increased. These models help us understand the increase in both the wealth income ratio and wealth...

This paper extends the standard life cycle model to a world in which there are also capitalists. We obtain simple formulae describing the equilibrium fraction of wealth held by life-cycle savers. Using these formulae, we ascertain the effects of tax policy or changes in the parameters of the...

This paper investigates the determination of the equilibrium distribution of income and wealth among individuals within a simple equilibrium growth model, where there is consistency between the movements of aggregate variables and the savings, bequest, and reproduction behavior of individuals....

The paper identifies, and then resolves, a number of seeming puzzles in a newly identified set of stylized facts entailing movements in factor returns and shares and the wealth-income ratio. Standard data on savings cannot be reconciled with the increase in the wealth-income ratio: there is a...

The study of the bias of new technologies is important both as part of the analysis of the nature of technology adoption and the direction of technological change, and to understand the distributional implications of new technologies. In this paper, I analyze the equilibrium bias of technology....

We document substantial within-country (cross-municipality) differences in incomes for a large number of countries in the Americas. A significant fraction of the within-country differences cannot be explained by observed human capital. We conjecture that the sources of within-country and...

In this paper we revisit the relationship between democracy, redistribution and inequality. We first explain the theoretical reasons why democracy is expected to increase redistribution and reduce inequality, and why this expectation may fail to be realized when democracy is captured by the...

The economics profession has made considerable progress in understanding the increase in wage inequality in the U.S. and the UK over the past several decades, but currently lacks a consensus on why inequality did not increase, or increased much less, in (continental) Europe over the same time...

Among countries colonized by European powers during the past 500 years those that were relatively rich in 1500 are now relatively poor. We document this reversal using data on urbanization patterns and population density, which, we argue, proxy for economic prosperity. This reversal is...

We show that even in the absence of diminishing returns in production and techno-logical spillovers, international trade leads to a stable world income distribution. This is because specialization and trade introduce de facto diminishing returns: countries that accumulate capital faster than...