Uneven Growth: Automation's Impact on Income and Wealth Inequality / Benjamin Moll, Lukasz Rachel, Pascual Restrepo.

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Moll, Benjamin

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Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w28440.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2021.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

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Abstract: The benefits of new technologies accrue not only to high-skilled labor but also to owners of capital in the form of higher capital incomes. This increases inequality. To make this argument, we develop a tractable theory that links technology to the personal income and wealth distributions - and not just that of wages - and use it to study the distributional effects of automation. We isolate a new theoretical mechanism: automation increases inequality via returns to wealth. The flip side of such return movements is that automation is more likely to lead to stagnant wages and therefore stagnant incomes at the bottom of the distribution. We use a multi-asset model extension to confront differing empirical trends in returns to productive and safe assets and show that the relevant return measures have increased over time. Automation accounts for part of the observed trends in income and wealth inequality and macroeconomic aggregates.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w28440 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

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February 2021.

The benefits of new technologies accrue not only to high-skilled labor but also to owners of capital in the form of higher capital incomes. This increases inequality. To make this argument, we develop a tractable theory that links technology to the personal income and wealth distributions - and not just that of wages - and use it to study the distributional effects of automation. We isolate a new theoretical mechanism: automation increases inequality via returns to wealth. The flip side of such return movements is that automation is more likely to lead to stagnant wages and therefore stagnant incomes at the bottom of the distribution. We use a multi-asset model extension to confront differing empirical trends in returns to productive and safe assets and show that the relevant return measures have increased over time. Automation accounts for part of the observed trends in income and wealth inequality and macroeconomic aggregates.