Income Redistribution, Consumer Credit,and Keeping up with the Riches

In this study, the relation between consumer credit and real economic activity during the Great Moderation is studied in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. Our model economy is populated by two diff erent household types. Investors, who hold the economy’s capital stock, own the fi rms and supply credit, and workers, who supply labor and demand credit to fi nance consumption. Furthermore, workers seek to minimize the diff erence between investors’ and their own consumption level. Qualitatively, an income redistribution from labor to capital leads to consumer credit dynamics that are in line with the data. As a validation exercise, we simulate a threeshock version of the model and fi nd that our theoretical set-up is able to reproduce important business cycle correlations.