On macroeconomic implications of poverty and inequality

This dissertation studies some implications of poverty and inequality in macroeconomics. In the first essay, I analyze the worker's incentives to acquire skills under technological progress when the costs of education are endogenous, and depend on the wage distribution. I show that the agent's intergenerational elasticity of substitution plays then a relevant role in determining how incentives and the long-run wage distribution react to technological progress. Moreover, whenever poverty traps of unskilled workers exist higher rates of technological progress can even decrease the incentives of low-skill workers to acquire skills. I also analyze the effects of educational subsidies. In contrast with previous analytical findings, I obtain that subsidies always decrease the long-run skill premium. Finally, I study the efficiency of the resulting competitive equilibria.; In the second essay, I study the relation between inequality and transfers in autocratic regimes, which account for almost half of the existing countries. I proxy for transfers using government and public education expenditures, and find that the ratio of transfers to GDP follows an inverted U shape with respect to overall inequality: it increases at low levels of inequality, and decreases at high levels.; In the third essay, I investigate the relationship between poverty, inequality and redistribution under the assumption that redistribution depends both on the individual intensity of political activity and on the enforcement of property rights. Because poverty hinders political activity while inequality encourages it, redistribution peaks at intermediate levels of inequality. Nonetheless, when I endogenize the degree of state resistance to redistributive pressures the previous relationship remains in general ambiguous except for a small set of "autocratic" regimes. Finally, I show that the theoretical model is consistent with the empirical findings of the previous essay.