We introduce permanently-shifting income shares into a standard growth model with two types of agents. Capital owners represent the top quintile of U.S. households while workers represent the remainder. Our tractable model allows us to exactly replicate the observed U.S. time paths of the top...

The distributional impact of proposed reforms plays a central role in public debates around tax and transfer policy. We show that accounting for realistic patterns of mobility in employment, earnings and household circumstances over the life-cycle greatly affects our assessment of the...