On impatience, temptation and Ramsey’s conjecture

International audienceThis article explores the implications of the introduction of self-control costs and temptation motives in intertemporal preferences in an elementary competitive equilibrium. We let heterogeneous agents differ in both their discount parameters and their temptation motives, and the degree of financial-market imperfections vary, and establish their implications for the long-run value of the capital stock and the underlying long-run distribution of consumption and wealth. The results differ from those obtained in a standard Ramsey benchmark model, in that long-run distributions are commonly non-degenerate