Are Unconditional Lump-sum Transfers a Good Idea?

The role of unconditional lump-sum transfers in improving social welfare in heterogenous agent models has not been thoroughly understood in the literature. We adopt an analytically tractable Aiyagari-type model to study the distinctive role of unconditional lump-sum transfers in reducing consumption inequality due to ex-post uninsurable income risk under borrowing constraints. Our results show that in the presence of ex-post heterogeneity and in the absence of wealth inequality, unconditional lump-sum transfers are not a desirable tool for reducing consumption inequality—the Ramsey planner opts to rely solely on public debt and a linear labor tax (in the absence of a lump-sum tax) to mitigate income risk without the need for lump-sum transfers, in contrast to the result obtained by Werning (2007), Azzimonti and Yared (2017), and Bhandari, Evans, Golosov, and Sargent (2017) in models with ex-ante heterogeneity.