Distributional Comparative Statics

Martin Jensen

Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Birmingham

Abstract: An important set of questions in economics concern how changes in the distribution of economic parameters (income, wealth, productivity, distortions, information, etc.) impact individual choices and market outcomes. We currently do not have tools to answer such questions. In this paper, I develop a theory of distributional comparative statics that addresses this set of issues. Central to the developments is a new concept called strategic risk-aversion which determines the outcome of the most distributional comparative statics exercises. As illustrations, I analyze the relationship between savings and the inequality, ask how risk influences agents' behavior in Bayesian games, and study con-cavity of policy functions in general stochastic dynamic programming problems.

Keywords: Comparative statics; strategic risk-aversion; income distribution; inequality; uncertainty; Bayesian games; dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models; concavity; convexity; policy functions; arg max correspondence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 D80 D90 E20 I30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2012-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.cal.bham.ac.uk/pdf/12-08.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Distributional Comparative Statics (2018)
Working Paper: Distributional Comparative Statics (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bir:birmec:12-08

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Birmingham Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oleksandr Talavera ().