Universität zu Köln

Löbbing, Jonas (2020). Essays on Economic Inequality. PhD thesis, Universität zu Köln.

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Abstract

Economic inequality has been rising according to various measures and in many countries over the last four to five decades. This thesis contributes to understanding the forces that shape income inequality in a market-based economy and studies their implications for the design of redistributive policies. The first chapter presents a generalization of central results from the theory of directed technical change, showing that these results hold much more generally than suggested by previous work. Most importantly, the restriction to labor-augmenting technologies required by previous results can be dropped without replacement. The second chapter studies the implications of directed technical change theory for the design of redistributive income taxes. It finds that, for a social objective that values redistribution from high- to low- income earners, the optimal income tax is more progressive, featuring higher marginal tax rates for high incomes and lower marginal tax rates for low incomes, when accounting for directed technical change. The third chapter provides a theoretical argument against the deregulation of markets for credence goods. It shows that a joint regulation of entry and prices can create Pareto gains in a credence good market if experts (the producers on a credence goods market) have an empirically reasonable form of social preferences and there is a common agency structure, whereby many consumers are served by the same expert.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD thesis)
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID ORCID Put Code Löbbing, Jonas jonas.loebbing@t-online.de UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED
Contributors:	Contribution Name Email Author in quotations or text extracts Farukh, Razi razi.farukh@uni-koeln.de Author in quotations or text extracts Kerkhof, Anna anna.kerkhof@wiso.uni-koeln.de
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-114682
Date:	16 July 2020
Language:	English
Faculty:	Faculty of Management, Economy and Social Sciences
Divisions:	Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences > Economics > Macroeconomic, Financial and Economic Policy > Professorship 1 for Macroeconomic
Subjects:	Economics
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Keywords Language Economic Inequality; Income Inequality; Technical Change; Directed Technical Change; Optimal Taxation; Credence Goods; Regulation; Social Preferences; Common Agency English
Date of oral exam:	14 July 2020
Referee:	Name Academic Title Funk, Peter Prof. Dr. Bierbrauer, Felix Prof. Dr.
Funders:	This research was partly funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy–EXC 2126/1–390838866
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/11468