We study a model of growth and mass production. Firms undertake either product innovations that introduce new luxury goods for the rich; or process innovations that transform existing luxuries into mass products for the poor. A prototypical example for such a product cycle is the automobile. Initially, an exclusive product for the very rich, the automobile became affordable to the middle class after the introduction of Ford's Model T, "the car that put America on wheels". We present a model of non-homothetic preferences, in which the rich consume a wide range of exclusive high-quality products and the poor a more narrow range of low-quality mass products. In this framework, inequality affects the composition of R&D through price and market size effects. The inequality-growth relationship depends on how mass production affects productivity; and on the particular dimension of inequality (income gaps versus income concentration). Our model is sufficiently tractable to incorporate learning-by-doing, oligopolistic market structures, and different sources of knowledge spillovers.
In the last 20 years, the share of top incomes in Switzerland has risen, while
exhibiting large variations. Switzerland is similar to European countries for the top
1% but closer to the U.S. for higher top income groups. With the synthetic control
method we close a time gap in the tax data, exploiting the fact that Swiss cantons
changed their tax system at different points in time. Using social security data
which cover all top labor incomes, we document the growing importance of labor
compared to capital incomes among top income earners in Switzerland.
This paper presents a dynamic North-South general-equilibrium model where per capita incomes shape demand patterns across regions. Innovation takes place in a rich North while firms in a poor South imitate products manufactured in North. Allowing a role for per capita incomes in determining demand delivers a complete international product cycle as described by Vernon (1966), where the different stages of the product cycle are not only determined by supply-side factors but also by the distribution of income between North and South. We analyze how changes in the gap between North and South due to changes in Southern labor productivity, population size in South and inequality across regions affect the international product cycle. In line with presented stylized facts, we predict a negative correlation between adoption time and per capita incomes.
We analyze a macroeconomic model of monopolistic competition in which consumers earn unequal incomes. When preferences are nonhomothetic, the distribution of income affects equilibrium markups and equilibrium product diversity.
Non-collusive corruption, i.e., corruption that imposes an additional burden on business activity, is particularly widespread in low-income countries. We build a macroeconomic model with credit market imperfections and heterogeneous agents to explore the roots and consequences of this type of corruption. We find that credit market imperfections, by generating rents for the incumbent entrepreneurs, create strong incentives for corrupt behavior by state officials. However, non-collusive corruption not only redistributes income from non-officials towards officials but also within the group of potential entrepreneurs. If borrowing is limited, bribes prevent poorer but talented individuals from starting a business. But this is likely to benefit those who may enter anyway; the cost of capital is lower and there is less competition on the goods markets.
Since franchise bidding in the piped water industry is problematic due to extensive investment requirements, product-market competition or common carriage is a valuable alternative for the introduction of competition. This paper analyses product-market competition by considering a simple model of interconnection where competition is introduced between vertically integrated neighbouring water suppliers. The model contains water markets specificities such as local and decentralised networks and related difficulties of regulating access charges. Even without any regulation, we show that: (i) an inefficient incumbent will give up its monopoly position and lower the access price far enough so that the low-cost competitor can enter his home market; (ii) efficiency of production will rise due to liberalisation; and (iii) in contrary to prejudicial claims, investment incentives are not destroyed by the introduction of competition for the market. Investments of low-cost firms may even increase.
We introduce non-homothetic preferences into an R&D based growth model to study how demand forces shape the impact of inequality on innovation and growth. Inequality affects the incentive to innovate via a price effect and a market size effect. When innovators have a large productivity advantage over traditional producers a higher extent of inequality tends to increase innovators’ prices and mark-ups. When this productivity gap is small, however, a redistribution from the rich to the poor increases market sizes and speeds up growth.
Globalization increasingly involves less-developed countries (LDCs), i.e., economies which usually suffer from severe imperfections in their financial systems. Taking these imperfections seriously, we analyze how credit frictions affect the distributive impact of trade liberalizations. We find that free trade significantly widens income differences among firm owners in LDCs: While wealthy entrepreneurs are better off, relatively poor business people lose. Intuitively, with integrated markets, profit margins shrink - which makes access to credit particularly difficult for the least-affluent agents. Richer entrepreneurs, by contrast, win because they can take advantage of new export opportunities. Our findings resonate well with a number of empirical regularities, in particular with the observation that some liberalizing LDCs have observed a surge in top-income shares.
