This paper estimates the distribution of personal wealth in South Africa by combining tax microdata, household surveys, and macroeconomic balance sheet statistics. We systematically compare estimates of the wealth distribution obtained by direct measurement of net worth, rescaling of reported...

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...

Recent studies of economic inequality almost always separately examine income, consumption, and wealth inequality and, hence, miss the important synergy among the three measures explicit in the life-cycle budget constraint. Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics data from 1999 through 2013, we...

Taking survey data on household wealth as our major example, this short paper discusses some of the issues applied researchers are facing when fitting (type I) Pareto distributions to complex survey data. The major contribution of this paper is twofold: First, we provide a novel take on key...

The lifecycle approach is the workhorse to model saving decisions of individuals. It conjectures individuals preferring a constant consumption stream across their lifecycle saving till retirement and dis-saving thereafter. The reality is often at odd with this assumption giving rise to our...

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...

The increase of wealth inequality in many EU countries has spurred interest in wealth taxation. While taxes on wealth for a long time have played only a marginal role in the public finance and taxation literature, more recently a variety of arguments are brought forward in favour of (higher)...

Building on the 2017 Hamburg Statement and the G20 Roadmap for Digitalization, this paper recommends a G20 framework for artificial intelligence in the workplace. It proposes high level principles for such a framework for G-20 governments to enable the smoother, internationally broader and more...

This paper uses SOEP data to study the distributional effect of intergenerational transfers on the wealth distribution of German households. Similar to most other central European countries, Germany is likely to face a period of increasing aggregate bequest flows. At the same time, there is an...

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...

We postulate a nonlinear DSGE model with a financial sector and heterogeneous households. In our model, the interaction between the supply of bonds by the financial sector and the precautionary demand for bonds by households produces significant endogenous aggregate risk. This risk induces an...

The inheritance tax is often seen as an effective tool to reduce wealth inequality, to raise public budgets if needed, and to increase incentives to work by lowering the tax burden on labour, which is especially high in Germany according to the OECD. The purpose of this paper is therefore to...

We have developed and implemented a new sampling strategy to better represent very wealthy individuals in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Our strategy is based on the empirical regularity that the very wealthy have at least part of their assets invested in businesses, and that businesses...

This report examines the inheritances that are likely to be received by those living in England who were born in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. We explore the age at which inheritances are likely to be received and the amounts that we expect to be inherited, focusing on key inequalities in each....

The Expert Group on Linking Macro and Micro Data for the household sector (EG-LMM) was established in December 2015 within the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) with the aim of comparing and bridging macro data (i.e. National Accounts/Financial Accounts) and micro data (i.e. the Household...

In fifteen European countries, China, and the US, stocks and business equity as a share of total household assets are represented by an increasing and convex function of income/wealth. A parsimonious model fitted to the data shows why background labor-income risk can explain much of this...

There are many reports on investigating the influences of institutional factors and Piketty's Hypothesis on income inequality; nonetheless, the inequality effects of both factors are seemingly investigated separately. We hypothesize that economic freedom viewed as an institutional improvement or...

We postulate a nonlinear DSGE model with a financial sector and heterogeneous households. In our model, the interaction between the supply of bonds by the financial sector and the precautionary demand for bonds by households produces significant endogenous aggregate risk. This risk induces an...

Individuals with assets in the millions of euros have been underrepresented in population surveys and accordingly little has been known about them. As a result, the full extent of wealth concentration in Germany was unknown. To close the existing data gap, the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) inte-...

In this paper we study the contribution of migrants to the rise in UK top incomes. Using administrative data on the universe of UK taxpayers we show migrants are over-represented at the top of the income distribution, with migrants twice as prevalent in the top 0.1% as anywhere in the bottom...

In early April 2020 we conducted a survey on a representative sample of more than 8,000 US households to study the effect of the coronavirus crisis on household income and retirement wealth, households’ expectations about the recovery, and the impact of the shock on individuals’ economic...

This paper studies the secular increase in U.S. household debt and its relation to growing income inequality and financial fragility. We exploit a new household-level dataset that covers the joint distributions of debt, income, and wealth in the United States over the past seven decades. The...

This book examines empirical and theoretical research on economic inequality from the perspective of dynamic models. By using advanced mathematical tools, it reveals fundamental market dynamics and underlines the role of subsistence constraints and competition in economic distribution.

We show how normative standpoints determine optimal taxation of wealth. Since wealth is not equal to capital, we find very different welfare implications of land rent-, bequest- and capital taxation. It is mainly land rents that should be taxed. We develop an overlapping generations model with...

How much does inequality matter for the business cycle and vice versa? Using a Bayesian likelihood approach, we estimate a heterogeneous-agent New-Keynesian (HANK) model with incomplete markets and portfolio choice between liquid and illiquid assets. The model enlarges the set of shocks and...

This paper examines the dynamics of wealth and income inequality along the business cycle and assesses how they are related to fluctuations in the functional income distribution. In a panel estimation for OECD countries between 1970 and 2016 we find that on average income inequality - measured...

The recent literature has argued for high concentration of earnings, differences in rates of return on assets and bequests as potential determinants of the high level of wealth concentration in the US. Analyzing the joint distribution of earnings, capital income and net worth, we find evidence...