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 the super-rich in Switzerland in ways that were not...

This paper provides a household-level perspective on the rise of global saving and wealth since the 1980s. We calculate asset-specific saving flows and capital gains across the wealth distribution for the G3 economies - the U.S., Europe, and China. In the past four decades, global saving...

This paper examines the association between stock market return expectations and financial wealth holdings of older adults using the 2016 wave of the Health and Retirement Study. Our study finds that less than 30% of individuals assigned a greater than 50% probability that the market will earn a...

Transfers from parents-either in the form of gifts or inheritances-have received much attention as a source of inequality. This paper uses a 19-year panel of administrative data for the population of Norway to examine the share of the Total Inflows available to an individual (defined as the...

In this paper we discuss the state of the literature relating to the decumulation of retirement wealth and the management of retirement incomes. On the one hand, life-cycle models which allow for strong bequest motives and the effects of medical expense risks have been shown to be able to...

Transfers from parents - either in the form of gifts or inheritances - have received much attention as a source of inequality. This paper uses administrative data for the population of Norway to examine the share of the Total Inflows (defined as the capitalized sum of net labor income,...

The rapid widening of intergenerational wealth inequalities has led to sharp differences in living standards in Great Britain. Understanding which components of wealth are driving such inequalities is important for improving wealth and social mobility. We show the change in the intergenerational...

Transfers from parents - either in the form of gifts or inheritances - have received much attention as a source of inequality. This paper uses a 19-year panel of administrative data for the population of Norway to examine the share of the Total Inflows available to an individual (defined as the...

In this paper, we present updated measures of racial disparities in wealth using the most recent data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), augmented by household-level estimates of defined benefit (DB) pension wealth developed by Sabelhaus and Volz (2020). Including this important asset,...

Wealth is distributed more unevenly than income, and one contributing factor might be that richer households earn higher portfolio returns. I uncover one channel that causes portfolio returns to be increasing in wealth: Poorer households consistently buy risky assets in booms-when expected...

This paper provides a household-level perspective on the rise of global saving and wealth since the 1980s. We calculate asset-specific saving flows and capital gains across the wealth distribution for the G3 economies – the U.S., Europe, and China. In the past four decades, global saving...

German history over the past 125 years has been turbulent. Marked by two world wars, revolutions and major regime changes, as well as a hyperinflation and three currency reforms, expropriations and territorial divisions, it provides unique insights into the role of country-specific shocks in...

Wealth surveys tend to underestimate wealth concentration at the top due to the "missing rich" problem. We propose a new way of improving the credibility of wealth surveys: We make them consistent with tabulated income tax data. This is possible with the Household Finance and Consumption Survey...

German history over the past 125 years has been turbulent. Marked by two world wars, revolutions and major regime changes, as well as a hyperinflation and three currency reforms, expropriations and territorial divisions, it provides unique insights into the role of country-specific shocks in...

This paper analyses the joint long-run evolution of wealth and income inequality. We show that top wealth and income shares were cointegrated over the past century in France and the US. We rationalise this finding using a two-agent version of the Solow growth model. In this framework, the...

Wealth in addition to income determines to a large degree an individual’s consumption opportunities and economic situation, which should in turn affect their subjective well-being. We analyse empirically the relationship between life satisfaction as an indicator of subjective well being and...

The study empirically tests whether regional differences in personal taxes (Personal Income Tax, Wealth Tax, and Inheritance and Gift tax) have had some influence on the decision of the richest Spanish taxpayers to change their residence. The estimates use the Personal Income Tax (IRPF) Panel...

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...

This paper tests whether disregarding home-improvements biases the housing wealth effect, the marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth. The housing wealth effect is decomposed in its endogenous and exogenous component by filtering out previously stated expectations of house prices...

Using data from the 1976 and 1978 National Longitudinal. Surveys of young men and young women, this study examines racial differences in the magnitude and composition of wealth and the reasons for them. On average, young black families hold 18 percent of the wealth of young white families, and...

This study explores how the health of Union Army recruits while in the service affected their wealth accumulation through 1870. Wartime wounds and exposure to combat, measured by the company mortality from wounds, had strong negative effects on subsequent savings. Variables on illnesses while in...

This paper provides new evidence on the decomposition of aggregate household wealth into life-cycle and transfer wealth. Using the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances, it finds that transfer wealth accounts for approximately one-fifth to one-quarter of aggregate wealth, suggesting a larger role for...

This paper presents new homogeneous series on top wealth shares from 1916 to 2000 in the United States using estate tax return data. Top wealth shares were very high at the beginning of the period but have been hit sharply by the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II shocks. Those...

This article studies the optimal use of fines and imprisonment when an offender's level of wealth is private information that cannot be observed by the enforcement authority. In a model in which there are two levels of wealth, I derive the optimal mix of sanctions, including the imprisonment...

This article studies optimal fines when an offender's wealth is private information that can be obtained by the enforcement authority only after a costly audit. I derive the optimal fine for the underlying offense, the optimal fine for misrepresenting one's wealth level, and the optimal audit...

Interest in the subject of wealth inequality has been stimulated by the recent work of economist Thomas Piketty in his best-selling book ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’, with the charity Oxfam having also been very vocal about this issue through their ‘Level it Up’ campaign. This...

The paper attempts to explain how a financial crisis like in 2008 in the US can affect income and wealth inequality. It extends the continuous time framework of Turnovsky and García-Peñalosa (2008), which models the dynamics of the income and wealth distribution in a Ramsey model, by...

Theoretically, wealthier people should buy less insurance, and should self-insure through saving instead, as insurance entails monitoring costs. Here, we use administrative data for 63,000 individuals and, contrary to theory, find that the wealthier have better life and property insurance...

This paper combines national accounts, household surveys, fiscal data, wealth rankings and election polls, in order to provide a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of income and wealth inequality in Hong Kong, as well as its impact on political cleavages over the 1981-2020 period. We find a...

In this paper, we address how returns on financial assets vary across the population. Exploiting rich administrative data, we can neatly describe the heterogeneity across all parts of the distribution of wealth. We find compelling evidence that the rich benefit from higher returns. Likely, this...

Recent empirical studies have found that consumption is more sensitive to current income than the life-cycle, permanent income hypothesis would predict.The present paper studies a model in which the fraction of consumers exhibiting excess sensitivity is endogenously determined. The presence of...

I use a quasi-experiment in Norway to examine how households respond to capital taxation. The introduction of a new wealth assessment methodology in 2010 led to geographic discontinuities in household exposure to wealth taxes, along both the extensive and intensive margins. I exploit this novel...

We use a sufficient statistic approach to quantify the general equilibrium effects of population aging on wealth accumulation, expected asset returns, and global imbalances. Combining population forecasts with household survey data from 25 countries, we measure the compositional effect of aging:...

The social security program will pay benefits of more than $100 billion in 1978. Public transfers on this scale are large enough to have profound effects on the behavior of the U.S. economy. The most important effect, although not the only one, is likely to be the impact of social security on...

We propose a life-cycle model, where individuals facing uninsurable labor income risks choose whether to participate the stock market and make decisions on home-ownership, in an environment with social safety net and the retirement savings system. The model is motivated by the empirical finding...

I examine the effects of an unearned income transfer on the retirement rates and living arrangements of a very poor population by studying the effects of pensions on the decisions of black Union Army veterans. I find that blacks were 2 to 5 times as responsive as whites to income transfers in...

By 1992, pensions and retiree health insurance represented one quarter of the wealth of families on the verge of retirement. Our simulations suggest that between 1969 and 1992, abstracting from the effects of changes in wages and years of covered work on pension benefit amounts, changing pension...

In HANK, we show that fiscal policy is an appropriate macroeconomic stabilization tool at the ZLB. Fiscal policy achieves the same macroeconomic aggregates and the same welfare as hypothetically unconstrained monetary policy by replicating its transmission mechanism. Consumption taxes and labor...

Investors can use leverage to increase the returns and profit of an investment. The so-called Kelly criterion is traditionally used to determine the optimal leverage factor for maximizing an investor’s absolute wealth. However, using the Kelly criterion may lead to too risky decisions for...