A Schumpeterian Model of Top Income Inequality

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Jones, Charles I.; Kim, Jihee
• 署名单位: Stanford University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST)
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-3808
• DOI: 10.1086/699190
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 1785-1826
• 关键词: covariance structure; optimal taxation; zipfs law; GROWTH; DYNAMICS; earnings; Pareto; KNOWLEDGE; ECONOMICS; wages

摘要

Top income inequality rose sharply in the United States over the last 40 years but increased only slightly in France and Japan. Why? We explore a model in which heterogeneous entrepreneurs, broadly interpreted, exert effort to generate exponential growth in their incomes, which tends to raise inequality. Creative destruction by outside innovators restrains this expansion and induces top incomes to obey a Pareto distribution. Economic forces that affect these two mechanismsincluding information technology, taxes, and policies related to innovation blockingmay explain the varied patterns of top income inequality that we see in the data.