This paper analyses the long-run effects of financialisation and of the recent financial and economic crises for 15 countries. In order to provide a theoretical framework, we first outline three types of regimes under the conditions of financialisation, namely a debtled private demand boom, an...

We analyse the link between income distribution and the current account for the period 1972-2007. We find that rising (top-end) personal inequality leads to a decrease of the current account, ceteris paribus. This result is consistent with consumption externalities resulting from upward-looking...

Thomas Piketty's (2014) Capital in the XXI Century aims to analyze distributions of income and wealth and their determinants, in a set of developed countries from the nineteenth century to the present. The objective is a bold one, made even more so by the fact that Piketty pursues it not only...

Our underlying hypothesis is that technological progress (even neutral) has a big effect on distribution, not only on growth, since rising waves of technical progress cause rising monopoly power. We test it by showing that, since the 1970's, information technology (in short IT) has caused rising...

We develop a model in which public capital is both an engine of growth and a determinant of the distributions of wealth, income, and welfare. Government investment increases wealth inequality over time, regardless of its financing. The time path of income inequality is, however, highly sensitive...

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...

Preserving environmental quality and addressing economic inequality both feature prominently in public discourse. Neither of these two issues can be fully understood in isolation, and policies aiming at one issue will increasingly have to consider interactions with the other. We synthesize...

What accounts for the growth of US top income inequality? This paper proposes a hierarchical redistribution hypothesis. The idea is that US firms have systematically redistributed income to the top of the corporate hierarchy. I test this hypothesis using a large scale hierarchy model of the US...