Power laws are pervasive in economics and social sciences, particularly in the upper tails of distributions such as wealth, income, firm size, and city populations. Their scale-free property makes them a universal framework to understand phenomena spanning several orders of magnitude. This...

How does economic growth affect individual wealth accumulation and, thereby, wealth inequality? Combining individual wealth from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and local GDP growth across 401 German counties, this paper documents a sizable Hometown-Growth-Wealth Nexus. We find that past...