Empirical evidence shows that entrepreneurs hold a large fraction of wealth, have higher saving rates than workers, and face substantial uninsurable entrepreneurial and investment risks. This paper constructs a heterogeneous-agent general equilibrium model with uninsurable entrepreneurial risk...

This paper studies capital accumulation and equilibrium interest rates in stochastic production economies with the concern of social status. Given a specific utility function and production function, explicit solutions for capital accumulation and equilibrium interest rates have been derived....

Recent research has shown that the "spirit of capitalism"¡ªa preference for wealth itself, in addition to consumption¡ªhas important implications for growth and asset pricing. This paper explores how the spirit of capitalism affects saving and consumption behavior. We demonstrate that the...

In a recent paper [Luo, Smith, and Zou (2009)] we showed that the spirit of capitalism could in theory resolve the two fundamental anomalies of modern consumption theory, excess sensitivity and excess smoothness. However, that basic model could not plausibly explain the empirical magnitude of...

It is puzzling why China has one of the highest investment rates in the world. In 1994 China introduced a new fiscal system. Using this natural experiment and the dynamic provincial panel data during the following period 1995-2002, we find that fiscal decentralization has a significant, positive...

We build a growth model with status preference to explore the effects of patent protection on innovation and social welfare. The main results are as follows. There exists a non-monotonic relationship between patent protection and innovation, and the growth-rate-maximizing degree of patent...