Inequality and Debt in a Model with Heterogeneous Agents

We propose a DSGE model with income heterogeneity to help discriminate across competing explanations of the cross-sectional divergence in debt-to-income ratios in US data. We show that for a DSGE model to be consistent with the data, the divergence in income growth should not be anticipated and should happen in an economy with low cost of access to financial intermediation. Differential productivity growth across the top and bottom-income quantile of the population has a much smaller impact on debt accumulation by the bottom income-quantile relative to a cross-sectional tax reallocation.