【Macro Seminar】The Preference for Wealth and Inequality: Towards a Piketty Theory of Wealth Inequality
2025/02/07
研討會日期 : 2025-02-07
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Matthias Schlegl
地點 : Conference Room B110
主持人 : Professor Been-Lon Chen
演講者簡介 : Professor Matthias Schlegl received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Munich in 2018. He is currently an Associate Professor at Sophia University. His research interests are Macroeconomics, International Finance, Monetary Economics, and Sovereign Debt.
演講摘要 : What are the consequences of the preference for wealth for the accumulation of capital and for the dynamics of wealth inequality? Assuming that wealth per se is a luxury good, inequality tends to rise whenever the interest rate is larger than the economic growth rate, and to fall otherwise. This induces the economy to converge towards an equilibrium with extreme wealth inequality, where the capital stock is at the golden rule level. Far from immiseration, this equilibrium results in high wages and in the golden rule level consumption for ordinary households. We then introduce shocks to the preference for wealth and show that progressive wealth taxation prevents wealth from being held by the richest people with high saving rates. This permanently reduces the capital stock, which is detrimental to the welfare of future generation of workers. This also raises the interest rate, to the benefit of the property-owning upper-middle class. By contrast, a progressive consumption tax successfully and persistently redistributes consumption and welfare from the very rich to the poor.
