The overall objective of the thesis is to investigate needs and incentives of all income/wealth groups in order to explore ways and means to remedy the excessive economic inequality. A closer examination of individual decisions across richer and poorer households allows us to recognize conflicts of wants, needs and values and subsequently to draw recommendations for future policies. The first chapter examines households' preferences over the redistribution of wealth resources. The preferences of voting households are restricted by agents' present and future resource constraints. The wealth resources vary over the business cycle, which affects the grounds for speculations of voting households. We augment the standard Real-Business-Cycle (RBC) model by the majority voting on lump-sum redistribution employing a balanced government budget. Our findings indicate that for the usual elasticity of labor supply both transfers' level and share of output are procyclical, with the procyclicality increasing in the discrepancy between richer and poorer households. In the second chapter we analytically demonstrate that all economic agents face subsistence costs that hinder economic and financial decisions of the poor. We find that the standard two-asset portfolio-selection model with a time-invariant subsistence component in the common-across agents Stone-Geary utility function is capable of explaining qualitatively and quantitatively three empirical regularities: (i) increasing saving rates in wealth, (ii) rising risky portfolio shares with wealth, (iii) more volatile consumption growth of the richer. On the contrary, "keeping-up-with-the-Joneses" utility with a time-varying weighted mean consumption produces identical saving rates and portfolio asset shares across richer and poorer agents, failing to match the micro data. Finally, in the third chapter we use Epstein-Zin-Weil recursive preferences altered to include subsistence costs, as this form of utility function enables trade-off between stability and safety. We pursue an analytical investigation of a more complex multi-asset portfolio-choice model with perfectly insurable labor risk and no liquidity constraints and find further support of the data evidence. If households' total resources are anticipated to increase over time, poorer agents can afford to gradually escape subsistence concerns by choosing lower saving rates and accepting only minor portfolio risks as their consumption hovers close to the subsistence needs. The calibration part of the model economy shows that analytical results can quantitatively reconcile the data, too.

[pt] À medida que a literatura de transformação estrutural esteve focada em explicar os Kuznets facts - um conjunto de regularidades empíricas apresentado pela dinâmica dos setores de uma economia - questões importantes ficaram à margem. A desigualde foi uma delas: Simon Kuznets, o pai dessa literatura, repetitivamente defendeu que desigualdade e dinâmica setorial eram relacionadas. Nesse sentido, nosso objetivo é extender o modelo canônico de trasformação estrutual de forma a introduzir distribuição de renda e riqueza entre indivíduos. Permitimos que haja risco idiossincrático e mercados incompletos em um ambiente de crescimento com dois setores. Em um exercício quantitativo, é conduzida uma transição secular entre uma economia pobre baseada em bens para uma economia rica intensiva em serviços - ao longo da qual o modelo gera uma curva em U invertido para a trajetória da desigualdade. Nossa contribuição é sugerir como o preço relativo entre consumo e investimento (que varia no tempo e decorre da estrutura multi-setorial do modelo) tem um papel importante no comportamento das medidas distributivas. Também mostramos que o consumo de subsistência, típico de ambientes de transformação estrutural, pode influenciar a desigualdade. Na sequência, o modelo é extendido com uma restrição sobre a capacidade dos trabalhadores de se moverem entre os setores - e mostramos como essa fricção pode amplificar o o formato em U invertido seguido pelo Gini de renda e riqueza. Por fim, nossa economia é calibrada para os Estados Unidos (1950-2000), gerando evidências qualitativas e quantitativas do efeito sobre a desigualdade de ambos os efeitos acima (preço relativo e consumo de subsistência). A evidência quantitativa, porém, é em certos casos limitada. / [en] While the structural change literature has been mainly focused on explaining the Kuznets Facts - a set of regularities concerning sectoral dynamics throughout economic growth - important issues were left apart. Inequality was one of them: Simon Kuznets, the father of this literature, when making some of the first documentation of structural change patterns, repetitively expressed his concern that inequality and sector reallocation were linked. In this regard, we seek to extend the benchmark model of structural change to introduce wealth and income distribution. We allow idiosyncratic risk and incomplete markets in a two-sector environment of growth. In a quantitative exercise, a secular transition from a poor and good s producer economy to a richer and service-based one is conducted. The model can account for an inverse U-shaped path for inequality as growth takes place. Our contribution is to suggest how a time-varying relative price of consumption and investment - yielded by the model s multi-sector structure - plays a role in the inequality behavior. We also show that the subsistence consumption requirement, typical of structural change setups, can influence distributional variables. The model is extended with a restriction over workers capacity to move across sectors - and we show that it amplifies the inverse U-shaped path followed by the income and wealth Gini. Finally, the model is calibrated for the US economy (1950-2000), yielding qualitative and quantitative evidence of the effect on inequality from both mechanisms presented above (relative prices and subsistence consumption). Quantitative strength, however, is in some cases limited.