When human capital accumulation generates pecuniary externalities across professions, and capital markets are imperfect, persistent inequality "in utility and consumption" is inevitable in "any" steady state. This is true irrespective of the degree of divisibility in investments. However,...

We compare the long-run effects of replacing unconditional transfers to the poor by transfers conditional on the education of children. Unlike Mirrlees' income taxation model, the distribution of skill evolves endogenously. Human capital accumulation follows the Freeman-Ljungqvist-Mookherjee-Ray...

Existing literature explains persistent inequality either by ongoing shocks to abilities or preferences, or by a combination of technological indivisibilities, capital market imperfections and ad hoc assumptions concerning savings behavior. We focus on the role of pecuniary externalities -...

This paper presents a theory of rent seeking within farmer cooperatives in which inequality of asset ownership affects relative control rights of different groups of members. The two key assumptions are constraints on lump-sum transfers from poorer members and disproportionate control rights...

This paper examines incentives of poor agents to escape poverty by saving. Owing to limited liability, low wealth creates borrowing constraints, preventing the poor from being able to finance productive projects. Future wealth increases resulting from current saving would relax these borrowing...

We model political parties as adaptive decision-makers who compete in a sequence of elections. The key assumptions are that <italic>winners satisfice</italic> (the winning party in period <italic>t</italic> keeps its platform in <italic>t</italic> + 1) while <italic>losers search</italic>. Under fairly mild assumptions about losers' search rules, we show that...