A Political Economy Model of Earnings Mobility and Redistribution Policy

This paper presents a politico-economic model that includes a mutual link between earnings mobility and redistributive politics. The model demonstrates that an economy attains a unique, unskilled-majority equilibrium where unskilled, lowincome agents support a low, rather than a high, redistribution when the economy is featured by a high opportunity of upward mobility and downward mobility risk. In contrast, the economy attains multiple equilibria when mobility opportunity and risk are low: one is an unskilled-majority equilibrium supporting high redistribution and the other is a skilled-majority equilibrium supporting low redistribution. Which equilibrium arises depends on the expectations of agents. The paper gives a comparison between the political equilibrium outcome and the social planner fs allocation in terms of mobility and redistribution policy.