Competition, Bargaining and Income Distribution in Argentina and the United States
CEMA Working Paper No. 148
25 Pages Posted: 9 Nov 2001
Date Written: May 1999
Abstract
This paper presents a model of capital accumulation and income distribution that comes from the dynamic interaction between capitalists and workers in an economy. The model is later applied to fit data from the Argentine and the US economies, and to test if they are closer to the implications of a competitive or a bargaining solution. The first one is associated to a Walrasian equilibrium of the theoretical model, while the second is computed as a Nash cooperative solution. The empirical results obtained seem to confirm our original intuitions that the United States exhibits a greater degree of competitive behavior and bargaining forces have been more important in Argentina, but no single behavioral hypothesis is able to explain income distribution in any of the two countries.
Keywords: Capital accumulation, income distribution, hypothesis testing
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