This articles focuses on the recent research efforts to incorporate income, wage and wealth inequality in macroeconomic models. I start by reviewing recent models on the impact of inequality on, on the one hand, long-run growth and, on the other, and macroeconomic fluctuations. The articles then reviews the literature concerned with the macroeconomic determinants of wage and wealth inequality. It concludes by discussing a number of possible avenues of research that seem to me particularly important, such as the impact of macroeconomic policy on distribution or the effect that firm size can have on both growth and wage inequality.

The long-term costs of protectionism are difficult to evaluate as very few countries have switched back to this economic policy after a long period of free trade. One country that did make the move was France in 1892, when the Chamber of Deputies, encouraged by the president of the customs commission, Jules Méline, decided to sharply raise cereal import duties. This decision slowed the upwards trend in education levels as it made farming jobs more attractive than manufacturing jobs, thereby reducing the relative return on an education. These findings are consistent with the theory of unified growth which associates demand for education with technological improvement. They also suggest that educational progress is reversible.

We examine the determinants of income mobility and inequality in a Ramsey model with elastic labor supply and heterogeneous wealth and ability (labor endowment). Both agents with lower wealth and with greater ability tend to supply more labor, implying that labor supply decisions may have an equalizing or unequalizing effect depending on the relative importance of the two sources of heterogeneity. Moreover, these decisions are central to the extent of mobility observed in an economy. The relationship between mobility and inequality is complex. For example, a reduction in the interest rate and an increase in the wage rate reduce capital income inequality and allow upward mobility of the ability-rich. However, the increase in the labor supply of high ability agents in response to higher wages raises earnings dispersion and thus has an offsetting effect. As a result, high mobility can be associated with an increase or a decrease in overall income inequality. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

After a decade of research on the relationship between institutions and growth, there is no consensus about the exact way in which these two variables interact. In this paper we re-examine the role that institutions play in the growth process using data for developed and developing economies over the period 1975–2005. Our results indicate that the data is best described by an econometric model with two growth regimes. Political institutions are the key determinant of which regime an economy belongs to, while economic institutions have a direct impact on growth rates within each regime. These findings support the hypothesis that political institutions are one of the deep causes of growth, setting the stage in which economic institutions and standard covariates operate.