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This paper investigates the redistributive effects of taxation on occupational choice and growth. We discuss a twoñsector economy in the spirit of Romer (1990). Agents engage in one of two alternative occupations: either selfñemployment in an intermediate goods sector characterized by monopolistic competition, or employment as an ordinary worker in this sector. Entrepreneurial pro_ts are stochastic. The occupational choice under risk endogenizes the number of _rms in the intermediate goods industry. While the presence of entrepreneurial risk results in a suboptimally low number of _rms and depresses growth, nonñlinear tax schemes are partly capable of compensating the negative by effects by ex post providing a social insurance.
Credit Constraints, Idiosyncratic Risks, and Wealth Distribution in a Heterogeneous Agent Model
(2007)
This paper examines the effects of credit market imperfections and idiosyncratic risks on occupational choice, capital accumulation, as well as on the income and wealth distribution in a two sector heterogeneous agent general equilibrium model. Workers and firm owners are subject to idiosyncratic shocks. Entrepreneurship is the riskier occupation. Compared to an economy with perfect capital markets, we find for the case of serially correlated shocks that more individuals choose the entrepreneurial profession in the presence of credit constraints, and that the fluctuation between occupations increases too. Workers and entrepreneurs with high individual productivity tend to remain in their present occupation, whereas low productivity individuals are more likely to switch between professions. Interestingly, these results reverse if we assume iid shocks, thus indicating that the nature of the underlying shocks plays an important role for the general equilibrium effects. In general, the likelihood of entrepreneurship increases with individual wealth.
This paper discusses the emergence of endogenous redistributive cycles in a stochastic growth model with incomplete asset markets and heterogeneous agents, where agents vote on the degree of progressivity in the taxñtransferñscheme. The model draws from BÈnabou (1996) and ties the bias in the distribution of political power to the degree of inequality in the society, thereby triggering redistributive cycles which then give rise to a nonlinear, cyclical pattern of savings rates, growth and inequality over time.
The paper demonstrates how the E–stability principle introduced by Evans and Honkapohja can be applied to models with heterogeneous and private information in order to assess the stability of rational expectations equilibria under learning. The paper extends already known stability results for the Grossman and Stiglitz model to a more general case with many differentially informed agents and to the case where information is endogenously acquired by optimizing agents. In both cases it turns out that the rational expectations equilibrium of the model is inherently E-stable and thus locally stable under recursive least squares learning.
This paper analyzes conditions for existence of a strongly rational expectations equilibrium (SREE) in models with private information, where the amount of private information is endogenously determined. It is shown that the conditions for existence of a SREE known from models with exogenously given private information do not change as long as it is impossible to use the information transmitted through market prices. In contrast, these conditions are too weak, when there is such learning from prices. It turns out that the properties of the function which describes the costs that are associated with the individual acquisition of information are important in this respect. In case of constant marginal costs, prices must be half as informative than private signals in order for a SREE to exist. An interpretation of this result that falls back on the famous Grossman–Stiglitz–Paradox is also given.
