In this paper I present the ideas, preliminary results and future steps of a long term project aimed at investigating the distributional consequences of aggregate crises and the role of inequality and social insurance in shaping aggregate activity in times of crisis. For that, I develop a...

This paper presents a model of secular stagnation, income and wealth distribution, and employment in the Classical Political Economy tradition, that can be contrasted with the accounts by Piketty (2014) and Gordon (2015). In these explanations, an exogenous reduction in the growth rate g...

Using data from the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances and the U.S. Census Bureau, along with data and research from other sources, this paper presents seven economic facts about the racial wealth gap in the U.S. We present data on racial disparities in income, employment, homeownership,...

Four alarming stylized facts have characterized the recent economic history of the United States: (i) a fall in labor productivity; (ii) a fall in the labor share, (iii) an increase in the capital income ratio, and (iv) an increase in the wealth share owned by top income earners. In this paper,...

After much empirical documentation of patterns of inequality, we address in this paper the need for a convincing interpretation of the causes of inequality in advanced countries. We set the current debate in the context of the evolution of ideas on inequality, including the debate on Thomas...

We study the impact of a government spending shock on the distribution of income and wealth between cohorts in a dynamic stochastic Overlapping Generations model with two types of households, Ricardian households and rule-of-thumb consumers. We demonstrate that an unexpected increase in...

Four alarming stylized facts have recently emerged in the United States: (i) a decline in the labor share of income; (ii) a decline in labor productivity; (iii) an increase in the top 1% wealth share, and (iv) an increase in the capital-income ratio. In Capital in the XXI Century, Thomas...

We propose a dynamic stochastic model of the intergenerational transmission of capital that accounts for fertility differentials. The evolution of the distribution of capital depends on a parent-to-child capital transmission technology, which captures how capital is diluted across siblings, and...

We develop a general equilibrium model of earnings, income and wealth heterogeneity in continuous time. We extend existing analytical and numerical methods to solve the model. We calibrate the model to U.S. data and find that stochastic interest rates provide a mechanism to link earnings, income...

Since the late twentieth century there has been a growing interest in academic and political circles on inequality. In this paper, we develop a systematic analysis of the literature on this topic published in economic journals since the 1950s. This is done through an innovative approach that...