COMPARING INCOME DISTRIBUTIONS BETWEEN ECONOMIES THAT REWARD INNOVATION AND THOSE THAT REWARD KNOWLEDGE

In this paper, we develop an optimal control model of labor allocation in two types of economy - one economy is for innovative workers and the other one for knowledge workers. In both economies, workers allocate time between learning and discovering new knowledge. Both markets consist of a continuum of heterogeneous agents that are distinguished by their learning ability. Workers are rewarded for the knowledge they possess in the knowledge economy, and only for the new knowledge they create in the innovative economy. We show that, at steady state, while human capital accumulation is higher in the knowledge economy, the rate of knowledge creation is not necessarily higher in the innovative economy. Secondly, we prove that when the cost of learning is sufficiently high, the distribution of net wage income in the knowledge economy dominates that in the innovative economy in the first degree.