On the Impatience Foundations of Long-run Heterogeneity.

This article is aimed at the reconsideration of Ramsey long-run distribution concerns, i.e., the so-called impatience problem, when consumption paths display homothetic growth. Is it possible for heterogeneous agents to survive in the course of an equilibrium characterised by a common growth rate in spite of their dissimilarity ? For a two consumers environment, it is first recalled that it is only under an implausible knife-edge condition that involves individuals preferences plus techological parameters that a separable representation with an invariant rate of impatience can allow for positive consumption growth rates for both agents.