Heterogeneity in Macroeconomics: The Compositional Inequality Perspective. Ranaldi, M. & Palagi, E. Technical Report 57, Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, October, 2022.
Heterogeneity in Macroeconomics: The Compositional Inequality Perspective [link]Link  doi  abstract   bibtex   4 downloads  
This work presents a framework to jointly study individuals' heterogeneity in terms of their capital and labor endowments (endowment heterogeneity) and of their saving and consumption behaviors (behavioral heterogeneity), from an empirical perspective. By adopting a newly developed synthetic measure of compositional inequality, this work classifies more than 20 economies across over two decades on the basis of their heterogeneity characteristics. Modern economies are far from being characterized by agents with same propensities to save and consume and same endowments (Representative Agent systems), or by the existence of rich capital-abundant savers and poor hand-to-mouth consumers (Kaldorian systems). Our framework and results are discussed in light of the heterogeneity assumptions underlying several types of macroeconomic models with heterogeneous agents (Kaldorian, TANK & HANK, OLG, and ABM models). A negative relationship between behavioral heterogeneity and the economy's saving rate is also documented. (Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality Working Paper)
@techreport{RanaldiPalagi2022,
  type = {Stone {{Center Working Paper Series}}},
  title = {Heterogeneity in Macroeconomics: The Compositional Inequality Perspective},
  author = {Ranaldi, Marco and Palagi, Elisa},
  year = {2022},
  month = oct,
  number = {57},
  institution = {{Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality}},
  doi = {10.31235/osf.io/fjcxb},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/fjcxb},
  abstract = {This work presents a framework to jointly study individuals' heterogeneity in terms of their capital and labor endowments (endowment heterogeneity) and of their saving and consumption behaviors (behavioral heterogeneity), from an empirical perspective. By adopting a newly developed synthetic measure of compositional inequality, this work classifies more than 20 economies across over two decades on the basis of their heterogeneity characteristics. Modern economies are far from being characterized by agents with same propensities to save and consume and same endowments (Representative Agent systems), or by the existence of rich capital-abundant savers and poor hand-to-mouth consumers (Kaldorian systems). Our framework and results are discussed in light of the heterogeneity assumptions underlying several types of macroeconomic models with heterogeneous agents (Kaldorian, TANK \& HANK, OLG, and ABM models). A negative relationship between behavioral heterogeneity and the economy's saving rate is also documented. (Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality Working Paper)},
  keywords = {Cross-National Comparisons,Determinants of Wealth and Wealth Inequality}
}

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