About

Professor Stephen Turnovsky holds the Ford and Louisa Van Voorhis Professorship of Economics at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1968 and has been recognized with honorary doctorate degrees from Aix-Marseille University in 2005 and Victoria University of Wellington in 2009. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and has served as a former Editor of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, where he remains on the Advisory Board. Currently, he is a Co-Editor of Macroeconomic Dynamics, an Associate Editor of the Journal of Public Economic Theory and the Journal of Human Capital, and is involved with various other editorial and advisory boards. Turnovsky has served as President of the Society of Economic Dynamics and Control and of the Society for Computational Economics. His research focuses on economic growth, international macroeconomics, macroeconomic policy, public economics, and inequality, contributing extensively to these fields through numerous publications and leadership roles in academic societies.

Research topics

• Macroeconomics
• Computer Science
• Economics
• Mathematics
• Econometrics
• Microeconomics

Selected publications

• Redistribution, inequality, and efficiency with credit constraints

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2024-10-16

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  We develop a model that characterizes the joint determination of income distribution and macroeconomic aggregate dynamics. We identify multiple channels through which alternative public policies such as transfers, consumption and income taxes, and public investment will affect the inequality–efficiency trade off. Some policy changes can affect net income inequality both directly, and indirectly by inducing structural changes in the private-public capital ratio. This in turn influences market inequality and determines the distribution of the next period’s investment and net income. Income tax and transfers have both a direct income effect and an indirect substitution effect, whereas the consumption tax has only the latter. After developing some theoretical propositions summarizing these policy tradeoffs, we present extensive numerical simulations motivated by the South African National Development Plan 2030, the objective of which is to tame soaring inequality and increase per capita GDP. Our numerical simulations illustrate how the judicious combination of these policies may help achieve these targets. The simulations also suggest that the sharp decline in private-public capital ratio coupled with high degree of complementarity between the public and private capitals could be behind the persistence of market inequality in South Africa during the last two decades.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• International Trade Liberalization, Human Capital Accumulation, and Economic Growth

  Open Economies Review · 2024-12-19

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• International Trade Liberalization, Human Capital Accumulation, and Economic Growth

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Government expenditure and informality in an emerging economy: the recent experience of India

  Indian Economic Review · 2023-06-16 · 3 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Alternative monetary policies and wealth and income inequality: the monetary instrument problem revisited

  Macroeconomic Dynamics · 2023-08-11

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This paper compares the impact of setting the money growth rate versus pegging the interest rate on aggregate real variables and their distributions. In either case, the monetary policy, in isolation, requires the price level to jump to ensure intertemporal solvency but has no real dynamic effects. The choice of monetary instrument has consequences for wealth and income inequality, doing so in potentially conflicting ways. Following real shocks, the accompanying monetary policy will influence the ensuing transition. For real variables, this operates entirely through its impact on the speed of convergence and is negligible. For financial variables, the impact also depends upon the initial jump in the price level. These effects vary more substantially between policies and have more significant distributional consequences. Overall, the impact on inequality is dominated by the real shocks themselves, rather than the accompanying monetary policy. Finally, we compare these two policies to inflation targeting, which is shown to be the least favorable for reducing wealth inequality, but the most favorable for reducing income inequality.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Taylor rules: Consequences for wealth and income inequality

  Journal of Macroeconomics · 2023-06-24 · 4 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Endogenous labor migration and remittances: Macroeconomic and welfare consequences

  Journal of Development Economics · 2023-05-16 · 19 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Government Spending, Debt Management, and Wealth and Income Inequality in a Growing Monetary Economy^*

  Journal of money credit and banking · 2023-05-03 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract This paper compares the impact of government investment and government consumption on macroeconomic aggregates and inequality when the government deficit is money‐financed while maintaining a fixed debt‐money ratio. Real aggregate quantities are independent of the debt‐money ratio, as is wealth inequality, but income inequality is impacted. We also investigate the impact of these two forms of government expenditure on the macroeconomic aggregates and distributions, illustrating their sharply contrasting effects on the tradeoffs they entail. While government investment is more effective in increasing the growth rate and moderating inflation, it has a more adverse effect on long‐run income inequality.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Economic Growth and Inequality Tradeoffs Under Progressive Taxation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Effects of Globalization on Skilled Labor, Unskilled Labor, and the Skill Premium

  Open Economies Review · 2022-04-11 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Santanu Chatterjee

  Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology, West Bengal

  34 shared

• Theo S. Eicher

  28 shared

• Cecilia García‐Peñalosa

  27 shared

• Partha Sen

  Centre for Development Economics

  18 shared

• Peter J. Stemp

  17 shared

• Gonçalo Monteiro

  Universidade do Porto

  15 shared

• Jonathan Eaton

  15 shared

• Richard C. Marston

  14 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Harvard University

  1968

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the Econometric Society
• Honorary Doctorate from Aix-Marseille University (2005)
• Honorary Doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington (2…
• Jubilee Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences…