Politico economic consequences of rising income inequality

P. Dean Corbae (), Pablo N. D'Erasmo () and Burhanettin Kuruscu ()
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Burhanettin Kuruscu: Economics University of Texas at Austin

No 878, 2006 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: This paper develops a political economy model to evaluate how inequality affects policies via the political process. The model is an extension of Krusell and Rios-Rull (1999) to incorporate uninsured idiosyncratic risk to income. Using this framework, we evaluate the response of social insurance policies to rising income inequality. An important feature of dynamic political economy models that incorporate inequality is that policy outcomes affect the evolution of wealth distribution. At the same time, the distribution of wealth affects policy outcomes. These two features make it difficult to solve such models since distribution of wealth is generally a high dimensional object. We tackle this computational problem using the Krusell-Smith (1998) algorithm: we use the mean and the median of the wealth distribution to predict the evolution of prices and political outcomes.

Keywords: Inequality; politico - economic equilibrium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E61 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: Written 2006-12-03

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