Luca Zamparelli

Public Capital, Redistribution and Growth in a Two‐Class Economy

We develop a growth model with a productive and redistributive role for the public sector in a two‐class economy. We focus on two different model closures: a Classical‐Marxian one, which produces endogenous growth, and a Post‐Keynesian one where growth is exogenous. When growth is endogenous, the policy maker fixes the long run accumulation rate and the after tax income shares. In the exogenous growth model, the government determines the after tax income shares and the unemployment compensation. In both cases, the policy choice is compared to a benchmark scenario involving no redistribution.

ENDOGENOUS TECHNICAL CHANGE IN ALTERNATIVE THEORIES OF GROWTH AND DISTRIBUTION

This paper surveys the last two and a half decades of non-neoclassical literature on endogenous technical change and the factor distribution of income. The implications of classical- Marxian and post-Keynesian contributions are compared with neoclassical exogenous and endogenous growth theories. We find the comparison illuminating in several respects: despite the strong differences in the assumptions regarding the substitutability between capital and labor, the role of different classes in society, and whether or not productive factors are fully employed, the various alternative models can be classified in a way that highlights remarkable similarities with their neoclassical counterparts. Both neoclassical and alternative theories of endogenous growth: (i) have shown that long-run growth is sensitive to investment decisions; (ii) rely on a linear spillover from the stock of knowledge to the production of innovations, and (iii) match the Kaldor facts in the long run. The comparison allows to evaluate competing theories by looking at the different channels they emphasize: saving behavior and market structure in the neoclassical theories, as opposed to income distribution, the state of the labor market, and investors’ behavior in alternative theories.

Endogenous technical change, employment and distribution in the Goodwin model of the growth cycle

Abstract In this paper, we introduce endogenous technological change through R&D expenditure on labor-augmenting innovation in the cyclical growth model by Goodwin (Goodwin, R. 1967. “A Growth Cycle.” In Socialism, Capitalism, and Economic Growth, edited by Carl Feinstein, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.). Innovation is a costly, forward-looking process financed out of profits, and pursued by owners of capital stock (capitalists) in order to foster labor productivity and save on labor requirements. Our main findings are: (i) Goodwin-type distributive cycles arise even with dynamic optimization, but (ii) endogenous technical change has a dampening effect on economic fluctuations; (iii) steady state per capita growth, income distribution and employment rate are endogenous, and depend on the capitalists’ discount rate, the institutional variables regulating the labor market, and policy variables such as subsidies to R&D activity. Implementing the model numerically to match long run data for the US, we show that: (iv) an increase in the capitalists’ discount rate lowers per-capita growth, the employment rate and the labor share; (v) an increase in workers’ bargaining strength moderately raises the labor share and moderately decreases per-capita growth, while sharply reducing employment: quarterly US fluctuations (1948–2006) in employment and the labor share seem to support this result; (vi) a balanced budget increase in the R&D subsidy also fosters per-capita growth at the expenses of the labor share, even though the corresponding variations might be small.

Growth, Income Distribution, and the Entrepreneurial State

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 funded research and development (R&D), which augments the growth rate of labor productivity. We study two versions of the model: with and without induced technical change, that is with or without a feedback from the labor share to labor productivity growth. In both cases we show that: (i) provided that the output-elasticity of infrastructure is greater than the elasticity of labor productivity growth to public R&D, there exists a tax rate that maximizes the long-run labor share, and it is smaller than the growth-maximizing tax rate; (ii) the long-run share of labor is always increasing in the share of public spending in infrastructure; (iii) different taxation schemes can affect the stability of growth cycles.

ANALYTICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

This paper is the Introduction to the Special Issue on Analytical Political Economy.