Rent seeking leads to a misallocation of resources that worsens economic outcomes and reduces aggregate welfare. We conduct a quantitative examination of the distributional effects of rent extraction via the financial sector. Rent seeking introduces a possibility for insurance against...

This paper examines the impact of oil revenues on the Iranian economy over the past hundred years, spanning the period 1908-2010. It is shown that although oil has been produced in Iran over a very long period, its importance in the Iranian economy was relatively small up until the early 1960s....

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...

The effect of a permanent change of inflation on the distribution of wealth is analyzed in a general equilibrium OLG model that is calibrated with regard to the characteristics of the US economy. Poor agents accumulate savings predominantly in the form of money, while rich agents participate in...

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...

We take into account that envy (relative consumption concerns) is more pronounced in the present than in the future. We consider a Ramsey-type model in which agents differ only in their initial capital endowments but are identical in their exogenous parameters. Agents' preferences exhibit...

We collect, digitize, and supplement the Swiss rich list for the years 1989-2020 published in the "BILANZ" business magazine to gain new insights on the structure and dynamics of top wealth in Switzerland. Using this data allows us study the super-rich in Switzerland in ways that were not...

The empirical literature is inconclusive about whether a country's democratization goes hand in hand with a reallocation of economic resources. With newly available individual-level data of former residents of the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR), we analyse how supporters and...

Like in many other countries, wealth inequality has increased in Switzerland over the last fifty years. By providing new evidence on cantonal top wealth shares for each of the 26 cantons since 1969, we show that the overall trend masks striking differences across cantons, both in levels and...

We calibrate a sequence of four nested models to study the dynamics of wealth accumulation. Individuals maximize a utility function whose arguments are consumption and investment. They desire to accumulate wealth for its own sake - this is not a life-cycle model. A competitive firm produces a...