Topics on the Dynamics of the Income and Wealth Distribution

9309514里奥斯-鲁尔首席研究员将研究一系列相互关联的项目，所有这些项目都具有研究收入和财富分配的决定因素和动态的特点。这些项目可分为两大类，它们的收入和财富再分配机制不同。第一组项目考虑无法投保的就业风险，而第二组项目允许通过税收政策进行再分配，这些税收政策是由代理人相互作用内在产生的。第一个项目试图回答这样一个问题，即战后美国收入分配的关键属性是否可以用与经济活动波动相关的变动来解释。就业和要素在产出中的份额都呈现出强烈的周期性行为。使用的模型很难计算，这项研究将解决一个更简单的近似经济。与上述问题相关的是，如何解释坚尼指数在财富分配中的巨大价值。第二个项目解决了理解巨大财富和收入不平等的起源的问题，该项目试图确定获得像观察到的那样的财富分配所需的不可保险劳动收入风险的过程的性质。这一劳动收入过程将与实证研究中发现的过程进行比较。这项研究的第二个主要部分涉及经济政策决定的一般问题，以及它与人们在关键变量上的分配的关系，比如财富。它建立在一种动态的政治均衡概念之上。涉及的具体项目是，首先，调查再分配模型在解释与增长业绩和财富分配相关的经验结果方面的成功。第二个项目探索二战以来收入和财富分配的变化。它的目的是找出这些变化中有多少可以纯粹从再分配的角度来解释。***

9309514 Rios-Rull The principal investigator will study a series of interrelated projects, all of them sharing the feature of studying the determinants and the dynamics of the income and wealth distribution. The projects can be divided into two main groups differing in the mechanism in place for the redistribution of income and wealth. The first group of projects considers uninsurable employment risks, while the second group allows for redistribution through tax policies that are endogenously generated by the interaction of agents. The first project tries to answer the question of whether the key properties of the income distribution in postwar U.S. can be accounted for by the movements associated with fluctuations in economic activity. Both employment and the factor shares of output present strong cyclical behavior. The models used are hard to work out and this study will solve a simpler approximated economy. Associated with the problem just described is the question of what can account for the large values of the Gini Indices in the distribution of wealth. This issue of understanding the origins of the large wealth and income inequality is addressed in a second project that tries to determine the properties of the process for uninsurable labor income risk that are required to obtain wealth distributions like the one observed. This labor income process will be compared to those found in empirical studies. The second main part of this research deals with general issues of economic policy determination and its relation to the distribution of people over key variables, like wealth. It builds on a dynamic notion of political equilibrium. The specific projects involved are, first, to investigate the success of the redistributional model, in accounting for empirical findings that relate growth performance and the distribution of wealth. The second project explores the changes in the income and wealth distribution since World War II. It aims to find out how much of those changes can be accounted for purely on redistributional grounds. ***