Growth, Inflation, and Household Heterogeneity

Sammanfattning: This doctoral dissertation presents three self-contained essays in macroeconomics. Endogenous Technological Change Along the Demographic Transition analyzes how the demographic shift associated with rising old-age population shares affects output per capita. Using an overlapping-generations model calibrated to the United States, this paper finds that the current ageing of the US population increases output per capita once its impact on technological change is considered, but not otherwise. A Nonhomothetic Price Index and Cost-of-Living Inequality derives a price index which accounts for the fact that rich and poor people consume goods in different proportions and consequently face different changes in the cost of living as prices fluctuate. The presented framework provides a method to obtain distinct measures of inflation at the household level as well as at the aggregate level, which is applied in the paper to study inflation inequality in US consumer expenditure data. A Distributional PCE Price Index From Aggregate Data uses the same price index method to demonstrate how to obtain household-level inflation measures in the absence of detailed microdata on consumer spending. Applying this method to US national accounts data reveals a noticeably larger inflation rate for poor households, both in the 2021–2023 inflation surge and in the long run.