We re-examine the theoretical and empirical relationship between income inequality and economic growth in an endogenous growth model with a flat tax on income, distributive conflicts among agents and median voter dynamics. We show that when government spends tax revenue on the provision of public goods in the form of both production and consumption services, the theoretical relationship between inequality and economic growth is neither strictly positive nor strictly negative but that it is ambiguous. An empirical evaluation of the theoretical findings is done by applying a semi-parametric model on a sample of 55 low-income, lower-middle-income, upper-middle-income and high-income countries for the period 1980 to 2010. Results show that the relationship between income inequality and growth takes the form of an inverted-U shape in that income inequality initially has a positive impact on growth up to an average Gini coefficient threshold of 35.92 beyond which it negatively impacts on growth.

We provide an alternative theoretical explanation to the tax evasion-inflation relationship by endogenizing the discount factor in a standard overlapping generations endowment economy. When the discount factor is a positive function of non-productive public expenditure, then inflation is bound to increase seigniorage, leading to an increase in public expenditure. In consequence, old age consumption increases in importance such that tax evasion among young-age agents increases to enhance the interest income from savings.

We develop an overlapping generations monetary endogenous growth (generated by productive public expenditures) model with inflation targeting, characterized by relocation shocks for young agents, which in turn generates a role for money (even in the presence of the return-dominating physical capital) and financial intermediaries. Based on this model, we show that growth dynamics emerge with a S-shaped growth path producing three equilibria. The low and high-growth equilibria are stable, but locally indeterminate, while the medium-growth equilibrium is unstable. Since, government expenditure is productive in our model, a higher inflation-target would translate into higher growth, but under multiple equilibria, this is not necessarily always the case.

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