In this paper I investigate the causal relationship between labor market polarization and intergenerational mobility, two of the most important features of advanced labor markets in recent decades. The former relates to the disappearance of middle-wage routine jobs and the rise of both high- and...

Economic growth varies substantially across regions and over time. This paper shows that economic growth in a person's birth place is an important determinant for wealth in adulthood. We exploit a new dataset that oversamples wealthy individuals in Germany and includes information on birth...

We develop a model of a city populated by heterogeneous agents. Agents self-select into entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurs set up firms which hire workers. We characterize the equilibrium matching between firms and workers, as well as the within-city assignment of agents to locations. We then...

This paper uses a simple model based on the board game Monopoly to analyze the drivers of house prices and wealth inequality. Simulations show that inequality generally builds up fast even if players have equal starting conditions and house prices are stable; rising house prices imply more...

We develop a general equilibrium model of earnings, income and wealth heterogeneity in continuous time. We extend existing analytical and numerical methods to solve the model. We calibrate the model to U.S. data and find that stochastic interest rates provide a mechanism to link earnings, income...

How can agricultural inheritance traditions affect structural change and economic development in rural areas? The most prominent historical traditions are primogeniture, where the oldest son inherits the whole farm, and equal partition, where land is split and each heir inherits an equal share....

Top distributions of income and wealth are still incompletely measured in many national statistics, particularly when using survey data. This paper develops the technique of incorporating the joint distributional relationship to enhance the estimation of these two top distributions. We leverage...

Creating distributional national accounts (DINA; e.g. Piketty, Saez, and Zucman 2018) requires the allocation of all government expenditure to individuals in order to compute their post-tax, post-transfer income. A sizeable part of government expenditure is in-kind spending, either in the form of...

We look at the effect of domestic redistribution policy on offshoring in an asymmetric two country model of monopolistic competition, heterogeneous firms and occupational choice. The redistribution scheme is modeled by a combination of a progressive income tax and a lump-sum transfer. We find...