We study the effects of envy (relative consumption concerns), drawing on evidence that preferences typically exhibit present bias. We employ a Ramseytype model with agents who differ in initial capital endowments and account for present-biased envy: agents are naive and care about how their...

An individual’s inequality aversion (IA) is a central preference parameter that captures the welfare sacrifice from exposure to inequality. However, it is far from trivial how to best elicit IA estimates. Also, little is known about the behavioural determinants of IA and how they differ across...

We study beliefs about wealth inequality and preferences for wealth redistribution. For this, we conduct a large-scale online survey in Germany. First, we analyze how well participants are informed about the German wealth distribution and their position in it. Second, we investigate how...

The purpose of this work is to examine the nature of the historically observed and empirically described by the Pareto law inequality in the distribution of wealth and income in an economic system. This inequality is presumed to be the result of unequal opportunity by its members. An analytical...

Power law distributions are ubiquitous in socioeconomic contexts. While their general properties are well understood, it is often less clear why they regularly appear in empirical data. What are the generative mechanisms leading to power laws, how do they arise in the real world? This paper aims...

In this report, we consider policies to help people appropriately manage their defined contribution (DC) pension wealth through later life. We draw on evidence in a report published alongside this one (Boileau, Cribb and Emmerson, 2025), which sets out key information on the landscape in which...

This report is one of two reports on the management of pension wealth in retirement conducted as part of the Pensions Review, led by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in partnership with the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust. In this report, we examine the decisions that older individuals face as...