Inequality, Economic Growth, and Technological Change

The book examines the relationship between inequality, growth and technological progress. It provides a broad overview of the existing literature and introduces specific, innovative aspects about the impact of inequality and redistribution on growth when growth is driven by human or physical capital investments, as well as the impact of technological progress and accumulation on the distribution of earnings.
There is a special focus on the role of social comparison, redistributive taxation and new information technologies for the relationship between inequality and growth. The analytical part of the book mainly consists of endogenous growth models.

The book examines the relationship between inequality, growth and technological progress. It provides a broad overview of the existing literature and introduces specific, innovative aspects about the impact of inequality and redistribution on growth when growth is driven by human or physical capital investments, as well as the impact of technological progress and accumulation on the distribution of earnings. There is a special focus on the role of social comparison, redistributive taxation and new information technologies for the relationship between inequality and growth. The analytical part of the book mainly consists of endogenous growth models.

1 Where do we stand? A survey.- 1.1 Growth and the functional income distribution: the classical and Marxian perspective.- 1.2 Distributional aspects of Keynesian and neoclassical growth theory.- 1.3 The Kuznets hypothesis and some cross-section data.- 1.4 How inequality and redistribution affects growth.- 1.5 How technological change affects the income distribution.- 2 Status concerns, inequality, and growth.- 2.1 Motivation.- 2.2 The model.- 2.3 Equilibrium growth.- 2.4 Preferred growth rates and redistribution.- 2.5 Discussion.- 2.6 Summary.- Appendix to chapter 2.- 3 Inequality, voting over public consumption, and growth.- 3.1 Motivation.- 3.2 Voting over public expenditure: a simple model.- 3.3 Public expenditure in a growth model.- 3.4 Equilibrium growth and public consumption.- 3.5 Individual demand for public consumption and growth.- 3.6 Voting equilibrium in the growth model.- 3.7 Discussion.- 3.8 Some empirical evidence.- 3.9 Summary.- Appendix to chapter 3.- 4 Skilled labor reallocation, wage inequality, and growth.- 4.1 Motivation.- 4.2 The model.- 4.3 Perfect foresight growth equilibrium.- 4.4 Comparative static results.- 4.5 Discussion.- 4.6 Summary.- Appendix to chapter 4.- 5 Where do we go from here? Conclusions and open questions.- List of figures and tables.- References.