Top Incomes, Rising Inequality, and Welfare

Kevin Lansing and Agnieszka Markiewicz ()

No 2012-23, Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Abstract: This paper develops a general-equilibrium model of skill-biased technological change that approximates the observed shifts in the shares of wage and non-wage income going to the top decile of U.S. households since 1980. Under realistic assumptions, we find that all agents can benefit from the technology change, provided that the observed rise in redistributive transfers over this period is taken into account. We show that the increase in capital?s share of total income and the presence of capital-entrepreneurial skill complementarity are two key features that help support the wages of ordinary workers as the new technology diffuses.

JEL-codes: D31 E32 E44 H21 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-lab and nep-mac
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/files/wp12-23bk.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Top Incomes, Rising Inequality and Welfare (2018)
Working Paper: Top Incomes, Rising Inequality, and Welfare (2015)
Working Paper: Top Incomes, Rising Inequality, and Welfare (2015)
Working Paper: Top incomes, rising inequality, and welfare (2012)
Working Paper: Top Incomes, Rising Inequality, and Welfare (2012)
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:fip:fedfwp:2012-23

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Research Library ().