This paper presents a simple model of an economy with heterogeneous agents to show that the redistribution of wealth among such agents can play a significant role in the propagation mechanism of financial crises. In an economy where firms with heterogeneous productivity operate under borrowing constraints, the redistribution reproduces hump-shaped responses for output and labor and procyclicality in observed productivity. In this model, a financial shock generates a persistent and hump-shaped response, whereas a productivity shock does not. Further, the redistribution of wealth significantly amplifies the persistence and hump shape of these responses following a financial shock. This model suggests that redistribution may thus be a key driving force behind the transmission of financial crises.

We introduce public spending, financed through income taxation, into the Ramsey model with heterogeneous agents. Public spending as a source of welfare generates more complex dynamics. In contrast to previous contributions focusing on similar models but with wasteful public spending, limit cycles through Hopf bifurcation and expectation-driven fluctuations appear if the degree of capital–labor substitution is high enough to be compatible with capital income monotonicity. Moreover, unlike frameworks with a representative agent, our results do not require externalities in production and are compatible with a weakly elastic labor supply with respect to wage.

Ramsey equilibrium models with heterogeneous agents and borrowing constraints are shown to yield efficient equilibrium sequences of aggregate capital and consumption. The proof of this result is based on verifying that equilibrium sequences of prices satisfy the Malinvaud criterion for efficiency.