This study examines the long-term effects of higher national debt in South Korea on asset distribution. Using an overlapping generations general equilibrium model, we focus on two key channels: rising interest rates and falling wage rates, both driven by the crowding-out effect of capital....

Bartels, Jäger and Obergruber (2024) examine how division rules for the inheritance of agricultural land affected distributional outcomes in 19th century and contemporary Germany. The authors use a regression discontinuity design to show that equal-division counties-those in which inheritance...

This paper introduces a framework for estimating long-run series of measures of overall inequality and top wealth shares when data consist of a combination of historical tabulations and modern administrative registers of taxable wealth. The proposed framework is applicable when historical wealth...

The question of whether affluent households save at a higher rate than other parts of the distribution has been asked by economists on numerous occasions since the 1950s. It is standard in this research to define affluent, or "rich," households as those with high lifetime earnings or income to...

In recent decades, the United States has experienced a notable rise in markups, a slowdown in productivity growth, and an increase in wealth inequality. We present a framework that unifies these trends into a common driving force. In particular, increased barriers to entry raise markups and...

A growth mindset-a belief that intelligence is malleable rather than a fixed trait-is a crucial factor for educational success. I investigate whether a growth mindset also plays a role in students' post-graduation life outcomes, specifically, in the pursuit of higher education in a nationwide...

This working paper examines how individuals morally, ethically, and emotionally evaluate extreme wealth disparities in their countries. Using cross-sectional data from the 2019 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Social Inequality V module, I compare two groups of EU countries with...

What happens across generations to random wealth shocks? Do they endure and even magnify, or do they dissipate? By implication, how much of modern wealth is attributable to events before 1900? This paper uses random shocks to family size in England before 1880, that created wealth shocks for the...

This paper investigates gender-related disparities in wealth in European Union countries using the 2010-2021 waves of the European Central Bank's Household Finance and Consumption Survey. To address the difficulty of within-household wealth allocation and provide a cleaner comparison of men and...

The purpose of this work is twofold: first, it aims to derive an exact analytical form of the Pareto index based on the already developed model of the economy as a scale-free network comprising a given amount of either wealth or income (total number of links, each link representing a non-zero...

Wealth inequality is not just an economic issue but a societal one. Ownership of assets can have significant implications for access to education, healthcare, housing and political influence. This study examines wealth inequality trends across EU Member States, using data from the European...

Wealth inequality is not just an economic issue but a societal one. Ownership of assets can have significant implications for access to education, healthcare, housing and political influence. This study examines wealth inequality trends across EU Member States, using data from the European...

Private pensions constitute the largest component of household wealth in the UK, and the vast majority of employees are automatically enrolled into workplace pension plans. Drawing on employer-reported pension data matched with the population census, we document that Bangladeshi and Pakistani...

The strong evidence in support of the Great Gatsby Curve (i.e. the negative cross-sectional relationship between intergenerational mobility and inequality) seems to be at odds with the fact that large increases in inequality in the US have not resulted in decreases in mobility. We tackle this...

Capital income is known to increase income inequality when measured on an annual basis, but the role of personal capital income in long-run inequality is rarely studied. Theoretically, capital income can increase or decrease long-term inequality depending on the correlation with other income. We...

Using historical income and wealth data, we show that war reduces inequality: the top-1% income share falls by 20% and the top-1% wealth share by 10%. We measure three key drivers of inequality - capital destruction, taxation, and inflation - in the data and quantify their role with a...