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This paper studies the effects of progressive income taxes and education finance in a dynamic heterogeneous agent economy. Such redistributive policies entail distortions to labor supply and savings, but also serve as partial substitutes for missing credit and insurance markets. The resulting tradeoffs for growth and efficiency are explored, both theoretically and quantitatively, in a model which yields complete analytical solutions. Progressive education finance always leads to higher income growth than taxes and transfers, but at the cost of lower insurance. Overall efficiency is assessed using a new measure which properly reflects aggregate resources and idiosyncratic risks but, unlike a standard social welfare function, does not reward equality per se. Simulations using empirical parameter estimates show that the efficiency costs and benefits of redistribution are generally of the same order of magnitude, resulting in reasonable values for the optimal rates. Aggregate income and aggregate welfare provide only very crude lower and upper bounds around the true efficiency tradeoff.

This paper aims to explain the significant variations in the social contract observed across nations. It shows how countries with similar technologies and preferences, as well as equally democratic political systems, can sustain very different average and marginal tax rates. Similarly, it provides an explanation for the striking difference between the US and European systems of education finance or health insurance. The underlying mechanism operates as follows. With imperfect credit and insurance markets some redistributive policies can have a positive effect on aggregate output, growth, or more generally ex-ante welfare. Examples considered here include social insurance, progressive taxation combined with investment subsidies, and public education. Aggregate efficiency gains imply very different political economy consequences from those of standard models: the extent of political support for such redistributive policies decreases with the degree of inequality, at least over some range. This can generate a negative correlation between inequality and growth, as found in the data, without the usual feature that transfers increase with inequality, which is not supported empirically. Moreover, capital market imperfections make future earning a function of current resources. Combined with the politics of redistribution this creates the potential for multiple steady-states, with mutually reinforcing high inequality and low redistribution, or vice-versa. Temporary shocks to the distribution of income or the political system can then have permanent effects.

This paper develops a simple model of human capital accumulation and community formation by heterogeneous families, which provides an integrated framework for analyzing the local determinants of inequality and growth. Five main conclusions emerge. First, minor differences in education technologies, preferences, or wealth can lead to a high degree of stratification. Imperfect capital markets are not necessary, but will compound these other sources. Second, stratification makes inequality in education and income more persistent across generations. Whether or not the same is true of inequality in total wealth depends on the ability of the rich to appropriate the rents created by their secession. Third, the polarization of urban areas resulting from individual residential decisions can be quite inefficient, both from the point of view of aggregate growth and in the Pareto sense, especially in the long run. Fourth, when state-wide equalization of school expenditures is insufficient to reduce stratification, it may improve educational achievement in poor communities much less than it lowers it in richer communities; thus average academic performance and income growth both fall. Yet it may still be possible for education policy to improve both equity and efficiency. Fifth, because of the cumulative nature of the stratification process, it is likely to be much harder to reverse once it has run its course than to arrest it at an early stage.