A firm may acquire additional caoital input by purchasing new capital or by increasing the utilization of its current capital. The margin between capital accumulation and capital utilization is studied in a model of dynamic factor demand where the firm chooses capital, labor, and their rates of...

Since the early 2000s, research by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and their coathors has revolutionized our understanding of income and wealth inequality. In this paper, I highlight some of the key empirical facts from this research and comment on how they relate to macroeconomics and to...

Many discrete life choices--where to live, what kind of job to hold, and consumption lifestyle--are stratified by income. Stratification and sorting often manifest state-dependent preferences in which the marginal utility of income (consumption) depends on the outcome of prior choices. For...

This paper reviews five striking facts about inequality across countries. As Kuznets (1955) famouslyfirst documented, inequality first rises and then falls with income. More unequal societies are muchless likely to have democracies or governments that respect property rights. Unequal societies...

This paper studies the relation between inequality and welfare in a general- equilibrium model in which people can choose to be either producers or preda- tors. We assume some people (the privileged) are well endowed with human capital and other people (the unprivileged) are poorly endowed with...

This paper shows how predation breaks the links between an economy's aggregate resourceendowment and aggregate consumption and between the interpersonal distribution of endowments and the interpersonal distribution of consumption. We construct a general-equilibrium model in which some people...

This paper generates two main contributions. First, it provides a new theory of wealth inequality that merges two empirically relevant forces generating inequality: bequest motives and inheritance of ability across generations; and an earnings process that allows for more earnings risk for the...