Fernando Jaramillo

Inequality and growth clubs

We apply the theory of coalition formation to prove the existence of growth clubs in an endogenous growth model.

Conspicuous Consumption and Social Segmentation

This paper develops the idea that conspicuous consumption has an impact on social segmentation, i.e., on the partition of the society into communities. Even though agents do not value conspicuous goods per se, they are competing in a signalling race in order to benefit from social interactions within a community. First, we study the equilibria of this model defining the optimal strategies and the equilibrium partition that characterizes pooling and separating equilibria. In a second step, as conspicuous consumption is a pure waste of money, we study a possible Pareto-improving taxation policy. Copyright 2003 Blackwell Publishing, Inc..

Conspicuous Consumption, Social Status and Clubs

The paper develops a signalling theory of conspicuous consumption where the drive toward spending on an otherwise unuseful good comes from the desire to enter clubs and benefit from the provision of club good financed by members of a club and from a social status effect. Individual incomes are unobserved and admission to a club is based on the inference of an individuals capacity to contribute to the public good. By entering in a club, individual also gains a certain social status. This inference in turn is based on the signal emitted by spending on a conspicuous good. Because of the joint incentives of club good and social status, people may be induced to over-spend in the conspicuous good. We characterize both the pooling equilibria and the separating equilibria of the signalling game played by individuals. We then ask whether taxation can be Pareto-improving and which tax scheme would be chosen by the median voter in this society.

Inégalités, mobilité sociale et croissance

The aim of this paper is to analyze the influence of social mobility on inequality dynamics and economic growth. We develop a framework in which agents accumulate human capital benefiting from two types of externalities: a social one and a local one. We first characterize the equilibrium partition which can appear at each date. We then study the dynamics properties of this model. We show that the economy can reach two possible steady states: an integrated equilibrium with the highest rate of growth and a segregated equilibrium.