This paper investigates preferences for limiting top incomes and wealth through a surveybased experiment with a large sample of participants (N = 3,954) from the US and Germany. Using a revealed preferences approach, we find that a significant majority (around 85%) of participants support income...

This paper analyses Austrian data on (financial) wealth and income. The main focus lays on the distribution of these indicators. Using a decomposition procedure of the Gini Index first proposed by Lerman and Yitzhaki (1985), it is possible to recover the effect of specific forms of investments...

This paper analyses Austrian data on (financial) wealth and income. The main focus lays on the distribution of these indicators. Using a decomposition procedure of the Gini Index first proposed by Lerman and Yitzhaki (1985), it is possible to recover the effect of specific forms of investments...

Rising inequality in income, wealth and consumption has received a good deal of public attention in the past years. At the same time, also macroeconomists are more and more interested in inequality as they have expanded their models to incorporate heterogeneity in the household sector. We supply...

We analyze the evolution of aggregate household wealth, its composition, and top wealth shares since the mid-19th century for the Netherlands, a country which played a significant role in economic history. The main forces at play are the size and variation of colonial wealth up until WWII, and...

Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy hold to a pessimistic belief in historical persistence - they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, suggesting it will be hard for modern social policy to create a more egalitarian society. This paper argues...

Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy hold to a pessimistic belief in historical persistence -- they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, suggesting it will be hard for modern social policy to create a more egalitarian society. This paper argues...

The Cambridge UK vs USA capital theory debates of the 1960s showed that the workhorse mainstream growth model relies on unsustainable assumptions. Its standard interpretation is not consistent with the last four decades of data. Part of an estimated increase in the ratio of personal wealth to...

Many studies of wealth inequality make the ergodic hypothesis that rescaled wealth converges rapidly to a stationary distribution. Changes in distribution are expressed through changes in model parameters, reflecting shocks in economic conditions, with rapid equilibration thereafter. Here we...

Poverty trap models are dynamical systems with more than one attractor. Similar dynamical systems arise in optimal growth and macroeconomic models. These systems are often studied empirically by ad hoc methods relying on intuition from deterministic systems, such as looking for multiple peaks in...