The existing superstar model (Rosen, 1981) does not require imperfect substitutes, and the convexity of total earnings with respect to talent is due to greater output for those with more talent. Our model explains why wages would increase at an increasing rate in talent. Imperfect...

This Paper explores the implications of the recent sharp rise in US wage inequality for welfare and the cross-sectional distributions of hours worked, consumption and earnings. From 1967 to 1996 cross-sectional dispersion of earnings increased more than wage dispersion, due to a rise in the...

This paper considers the effects of changes in the income distribution in an economy where agents’ utility depends both on consumption and on their rank in the distribution of consumption of a positional good. We introduce a new methodology to compare the behavior of agents that occupy the...

This paper considers the effect of inequality when there are concerns for status. We analyse the effects of linear redistributive taxes in an economy where agents’ utility depends both on consumption and on their rank in the distribution of consumption of a positional good. This increase in...

Cable Services (CS) has characteristics of excludable public goods, which means they have externalities, but with a degree of excludability to those who are not willing to pay its price. The paper analyses choices for CS using household data from small towns of India. The analysis is structured...

The aim of this work is to establish the personal income distribution from the elementary constituents of a free market; products of a representative good and agents forming the economic network. The economy is treated as a self-organized system. Based on the idea that the dynamics of an economy...

This paper documents how poorer and less educated US households hold a smaller fraction of foreign assets in their financial portfolio. This average home bias of the poor is partly due to a lower probability of participating in foreign asset markets, often attributed to fixed costs of market...

Most simulated micro-founded macro models use solely consumer-demand aggregates in order to estimate deep economy-wide preference parameters, which are useful for policy eva- luation. The underlying demand-aggregation properties that this approach requires, should be easy to empirically...

This paper discusses the links between earnings, consumption and economic welfare inequality. It places emphasis on the role of leisure and labor supply in the assessment of cross-household inequality and argues that the documented increase of such inequality has its origin in the labor market....

A key parameter determining the welfare impact from a world market shock is the transmission elasticity which measures the average domestic response to an international price change. Many studies have estimated price transmission elasticities for a large number of countries but the variation in...