Exploring the income distribution business cycle dynamics

Abstract

We document the business cycle behavior of the US income distribution and explore the extent to which unemployment spells and cyclically-moving factor shares account for this behavior by analyzing four heterogeneous household extensions of the neoclassical growth model. We conclude (i) that partitioning the population into five types subject to type-specific employment processes seems to be enough to account for most aspects of the US income distribution business cycle dynamics, (ii) that the role played by cyclically-moving factor shares is small, and (iii) that the income distribution business cycle dynamics may be essentially independent from the significant part of the observed wealth concentration that these model worlds fail to account for.