IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mib/wpaper/398.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Competition and Inequality: Aiyagari meets Bertrand and Cournot

Author

Listed:
  • Andrea, Colciago
  • Rajssa, Mechelli

Abstract

This paper provides an incomplete markets model with oligopolistic competition among an endogenous number of producers. The model matches the empirical distribution of income and wealth in the United States. The interaction between oligopolistic competition and incomplete markets reconciles the increase in the profit share of income with the decrease in the labor share of income and the increase in income inequality observed over the last three decades in the United States. Welfare costs associated with an increase in market power are large and unequally distributed across households.

Suggested Citation

  • Andrea, Colciago & Rajssa, Mechelli, 2019. "Competition and Inequality: Aiyagari meets Bertrand and Cournot," Working Papers 398, University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics, revised Jan 2019.
  • Handle: RePEc:mib:wpaper:398
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://repec.dems.unimib.it/repec/pdf/mibwpaper398.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Marco Cagetti & Mariacristina De Nardi, 2006. "Entrepreneurship, Frictions, and Wealth," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 114(5), pages 835-870, October.
    2. David Autor & David Dorn & Lawrence F. Katz & Christina Patterson & John Van Reenen, 2017. "Concentrating on the Fall of the Labor Share," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(5), pages 180-185, May.
    3. Makoto Nakajima, 2012. "Rising indebtedness and temptation: A welfare analysis," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 3(2), pages 257-288, July.
    4. Mariacristina De Nardi & Giulio Fella, 2017. "Saving and Wealth Inequality," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 26, pages 280-300, October.
    5. Federico Etro & Andrea Colciago, 2010. "Endogenous Market Structures and the Business Cycle," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 120(549), pages 1201-1233, December.
    6. Chris Edmond & Virgiliu Midrigan & Daniel Yi Xu, 2015. "Competition, Markups, and the Gains from International Trade," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 105(10), pages 3183-3221, October.
    7. Fabio Ghironi & Marc J. Melitz, 2005. "International Trade and Macroeconomic Dynamics with Heterogeneous Firms," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 120(3), pages 865-915.
    8. Toshihiko Mukoyama & Yoonsoo Lee, 2008. "Entry, Exit, and Plant-level Dynamics over the Business Cycle," 2008 Meeting Papers 454, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    9. Florin O. Bilbiie & Fabio Ghironi & Marc J. Melitz, 2012. "Endogenous Entry, Product Variety, and Business Cycles," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 120(2), pages 304-345.
    10. Jess Benhabib & Alberto Bisin & Shenghao Zhu, 2011. "The Distribution of Wealth and Fiscal Policy in Economies With Finitely Lived Agents," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 79(1), pages 123-157, January.
    11. Chris Edmond & Virgiliu Midrigan & Daniel Yi Xu, 2023. "How Costly Are Markups?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 131(7), pages 1619-1675.
    12. Doidge, Craig & Karolyi, G. Andrew & Stulz, René M., 2017. "The U.S. listing gap," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 123(3), pages 464-487.
    13. S. Rao Aiyagari, 1994. "Uninsured Idiosyncratic Risk and Aggregate Saving," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 109(3), pages 659-684.
    14. Krueger, D. & Mitman, K. & Perri, F., 2016. "Macroeconomics and Household Heterogeneity," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 843-921, Elsevier.
    15. Carroll, Christopher D., 2006. "The method of endogenous gridpoints for solving dynamic stochastic optimization problems," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 91(3), pages 312-320, June.
    16. Karen Kopecky & Richard Suen, 2010. "Finite State Markov-chain Approximations to Highly Persistent Processes," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 13(3), pages 701-714, July.
    17. Eggertsson, Gauti B. & Robbins, Jacob A. & Wold, Ella Getz, 2021. "Kaldor and Piketty’s facts: The rise of monopoly power in the United States," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 124(S), pages 19-38.
    18. Loukas Karabarbounis & Brent Neiman & Jonathan Adams, 2014. "Labor Shares and Income Inequality," 2014 Meeting Papers 539, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    19. Young, Eric R., 2010. "Solving the incomplete markets model with aggregate uncertainty using the Krusell-Smith algorithm and non-stochastic simulations," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 34(1), pages 36-41, January.
    20. Gao, Xiaohui & Ritter, Jay R. & Zhu, Zhongyan, 2013. "Where Have All the IPOs Gone?," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 48(6), pages 1663-1692, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jasper de Jong & Emmanuel De Veirman, 2019. "Heterogeneity and Asymmetric Macroeconomic Effects of Changes in Loan-to-Value Limits," Working Papers 635, DNB.
    2. Corina Boar & Virgiliu Midrigan, 2019. "Markups and Inequality," NBER Working Papers 25952, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Andrea Colciago & Rajssa Mechelli, 2020. "Competition and Inequality," Working Papers 689, DNB.
    2. Carroll, Daniel R. & Hur, Sewon, 2020. "On the heterogeneous welfare gains and losses from trade," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 1-16.
    3. Krueger, D. & Mitman, K. & Perri, F., 2016. "Macroeconomics and Household Heterogeneity," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 843-921, Elsevier.
    4. Guilloux-Nefussi, Sophie, 2020. "Globalization, market structure and inflation dynamics," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 123(C).
    5. Gouin-Bonenfant, Emilien & Toda, Alexis Akira, 2018. "Pareto Extrapolation: Bridging Theoretical and Quantitative Models of Wealth Inequality," University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series qt90n2h2bb, Department of Economics, UC San Diego.
    6. Andreas Fagereng & Luigi Guiso & Davide Malacrino & Luigi Pistaferri, 2020. "Heterogeneity and Persistence in Returns to Wealth," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 88(1), pages 115-170, January.
    7. Boppart, Timo & Krusell, Per & Mitman, Kurt, 2018. "Exploiting MIT shocks in heterogeneous-agent economies: the impulse response as a numerical derivative," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 89(C), pages 68-92.
    8. Sónia Félix & Chiara Maggi, 2019. "What is the Impact of Increased Business Competition?," IMF Working Papers 2019/276, International Monetary Fund.
    9. Toda, Alexis Akira, 2019. "Wealth distribution with random discount factors," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 101-113.
    10. Fève, Patrick & Cahn, Christophe & Matheron, Julien, 2024. "The Long-Run Effects of Fiscal Rebalancing in a Heterogeneous-Agent Model," TSE Working Papers 24-1550, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).
    11. Kacperczyk, Marcin & Nosal, Jaromir & Stevens, Luminita, 2019. "Investor sophistication and capital income inequality," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 107(C), pages 18-31.
    12. Stachurski, John & Toda, Alexis Akira, 2019. "An impossibility theorem for wealth in heterogeneous-agent models with limited heterogeneity," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 182(C), pages 1-24.
    13. Konstantinos Angelopoulos & Spyridon Lazarakis & Jim Malley, 2019. "Savings externalities and wealth inequality," CESifo Working Paper Series 7619, CESifo.
    14. Konstantinos Angelopoulos & Spyridon Lazarakis & James Malley, 2017. "Wealth inequality and externalities from ex ante skill heterogeneity," Working Papers 2017_07, Business School - Economics, University of Glasgow.
    15. Konstantinos Angelopoulos & Spyridon Lazarakis & Jim Malley, 2019. "The Distributional Effects of Peer and Aspirational Pressure," CESifo Working Paper Series 7838, CESifo.
    16. Daniel Carroll & Sewon Hur, 2023. "On The Distributional Effects Of International Tariffs," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 64(4), pages 1311-1346, November.
    17. Mariacristina De Nardi & Giulio Fella, 2017. "Saving and Wealth Inequality," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 26, pages 280-300, October.
    18. Konstantinos Angelopoulos & Spyridon Lazarakis & James Malley, 2019. "Savings externalities and wealth inequality," Working Papers 2019-05, Business School - Economics, University of Glasgow.
    19. Ziran Ding, 2022. "Firm heterogeneity, variable markups, and multinational production: A review from trade policy perspective," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 36(5), pages 1311-1357, December.
    20. Kaymak, Barıș & Leung, David & Poschke, Markus, 2020. "Accounting for Wealth Concentration in the US," IZA Discussion Papers 13082, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mib:wpaper:398. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Matteo Pelagatti (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dpmibit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.