Insegnamento a.a. 2025-2026

The course is divided into  8 main topics.
1. The Solow Model of Economic Growth and Basic Endogenous Growth Theory

2. Inequality Across Nations: Development Accounting and Structural Transformations

3. Inequality within nations I: Determinants of the labor share and its evolution in Europe and across the world

4. Inequality within nations II: Determinants of individual Income and Wealth inequality, and their evolution over time

5. Introduction to Optimal Income and Wealth Taxation: How much shall we tax the rich?

6.  Heterogeneity, Occupational Choice and Innovation 
7. Automation, AI and Inequality: Shall we Tax Robots?

8. Globar Warming and Inequality 

 

At the end of the course student will be able to...
Define concepts such as welfare, inequality, economics growth, financial wealth, tax elasticity, saving rate.
Identify the key sources of inequality and economics growth.
Describe the appropriate redistributive policy to make aggregate economies less unequal at the minimal cost for allocative efficiency and growth.
Being able to solve a dynamic model.
 

At the end of the course student will be able to...
Interpret and assess the phenomena and the inequality and long-term dynamics of the aggregate economic systems through economic theory.
Choose and apply the proper model to understand which economic policy is more appropriate to solve the trade off between inequality and efficiency.
 

• Lectures
• Guest speaker's talks (in class or in distance)
• Practical Exercises
• Individual works / Assignments
• Collaborative Works / Assignments

We plan to teach face-to-face lectures, but are prepared to complement them with (or switch to) online lectures if needed. 

The learning experience of this course includes, in addition to face-to-face lectures, links to very recent articles - with comments aimed at clarifying how each of them is related to the models and concepts introduced during lectures - will be made available, at regular intervals, on the course web page that students can access on the webpage of the course. Students are encouraged to go through the readings on an individual basis, to verify their understanding of the topics discussed in class.

The course include, home assignments, which are integral part of the course. In those assignments, students are asked to solve formal exercises as well as to perform descriptive analysis of economic data. Home assignments are intended to consolidate students' knowledge about the concepts presented during the main lectures and to allow them to revise and apply the analytical tools illustrated during the course (e.g., solve dynamic models of growth).  

The course includes TA classes where the teaching assistant reviews basic concepts and solve in class the home assignments. 

The course also includes a couple of gues lectures from researchers actively working on some of the topics consideres, such as Artificial Intelligence for example. 

During the course, the student are asked to solve at home 4 or 5 problem sets on the topics covered in class. Such problem sets count 12.5% for the final grade as long as the grade is higher that that of the final exam. Non-attending students are not required to solve problem sets but they should acquire them and the solutions as home assignments are integral part of the material of the course. The home assignments counts 12.5% for the final grade as long as the grade is higher that that of the final exam. 

The final exam consists of an in-class written exam, and will test the student knowledge and understanding of the material. The final written exam  counts 100% of the final grade. 
More precisely, the final written exam consists of exercises and/or open questions, aimed at assessing students' ability to: 
- Apply the analytical tools illustrated during the course.
- Solve static and dynamic economic models and explain their economic implications.
- Describe the consequences of a change in the tax rate and of a more composite tax reform.
- Intuitively describe the relationship between the level of taxation and the different variables in dynamic general equilibrium models, and link them to the observed data.

The exam also consists of short statements (true or false) to discuss, aimed at assessing students' ability to:
- Precisely define the main economic variables and concepts.
- Articulate economic reasoning.
- Correctly apply the knowledge and skills acquired during the course

There is  no mid-term exam. 
 

During the in class lessons, the student will receive lecture notes and additional material such as slides or excel files. The material will be uploaded on the course page so it will be available to all students, including the non-attending. There is no difference in the exam or the material of reference between attending and non-attending students.
On top of the material distributed in class, the course will be based on research barticles whose references will be given in class. Hree below I list some of them but the list is subject to chenges, especially if new research articles on the topics get published.
READINGS
- Chancel and Piketty (Journal of the European Economic Association, 2021): extit{Global Income Inequality, 1820-2020: The Persistence and Mutation of Extreme Inequality}
 - Hall and Jones (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1999): Why Do Some Countries Produce so much more Output per Worker than Others
 - Acemoglu Daron: Introduction to Modern Economic Growth; Chapters 1, 2, and  8. %To read: Chapters 3 & 4
- Barro and Sala-i-Martin: Economic Growth, 2nd Ed.; Chapters 6 and 7. 
- Duarte and Restuccia (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2010): The Role of the Structural Transformation in Aggregate Productivity
- Lucas Robert (The RAND Journal, 1978): On the Size Disatribution of Business Firms 
- Garcia-Santana, Moral-Benito, Pijuan-Mas and Ramos (International Economic Review, 2019): Growing like Spain: 1995-2007.
- Karabarbounis and Neiman (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2014):  The Global Decline of the Labor Share
- Acemoglu and Restepo (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2018, 33(2), pp. 3-30)  Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates Labor.

- Chetty, Raj, Nathan Hendren, Patrick Kline, Emmanuel Saez,  and Nicholas Turner (American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 104(5), 2014, 141-147)
Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Trends in Intergenerational Mobility Over 25 Years.

- Acemoglu and Restepo (American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings, forthcoming);  Unpacking Skill Bias: Automation and New Tasks
- Stancheva (Annual Review of Economics, 2020,12, pp. 801-831)  Dynamic Taxation
- Guerreiro, Rebelo and Teles (2022, mimeo)  Should Robots Be Taxed?
- Piketty, Thomas Capital in the 21st Century, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2014.
- Saez and Zucman (NBER Working Paper 20625, 2014),  Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data.
- Scheuer and Slemrod (NBER Working Paper 26207, 2019) Taxation and the Superrich.