The literature shows that when a society believes that wealth is determined by random “luck” rather than by merit, it demands more redistribution. Adverse shocks, like earthquakes, strengthen the belief that random “bad luck” can frustrate the outcomes achieved with merit. We...

In this paper, we introduce a twofold role for the public sector in the Goodwin (1967) model of the growth cycle. The government collects income taxes in order to: (a) invest in infrastructure capital, which directly affects the production possibilities of the economy; (b) finance publicly...

The Goodwin (1967) model of the growth cycle assigns distributional conflict a central role in the dynamics of capital accumulation, but is silent on the determinants of technical change. Following Shah and Desai (1981), previous studies focused on the effects of the direction, or bias of...