We study the wealth distribution in Bewley economies with idiosyncratic capital income risk. We show analytically that under rather general conditions on the stochastic structure of the economy, a unique ergodic distribution of wealth displays a fat tail; more precisely, a Pareto distribution in the right tail.

Does the existence of formal title to land and real estate matter for the distribution of wealth? This paper reviews the empirical literature on the economic impact of land and real estate administration systems across countries. This paper argues that a functioning credit market for secured credit is necessary to realize the full benefits of legal title to private real estate. This paper also ...

We study the distributional consequences of housing price, bond price and equity price increases for Euro Area households using data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). The capital gains from bond price and equity price increases turn out to be concentrated among relatively few households, while the median household strongly benefits from housing price increases. The capit...

The rapid increase of wealth inequality in the past few decades is one of the most disturbing social and economic issues of our time. Studying its origin and underlying mechanisms is essential for policy aiming to control and even reverse this trend. In that context, controlling the distribution of income, using income tax or other macroeconomic policy instruments, is generally perceived as eff...

Much of the macroeconomics literature dealing with wealth distribution has become abstracted from modeling housing explicitly. This paper investigates the properties of the wealth distribution and the portfolio composition regarding housing and equity holdings and their relationship to macroeconomic shocks. To this end, I construct a business cycle model in which agents differ in age, income, a...

This paper studies the business cycle dynamics of income and wealth distributions in the context of the neoclassical growth model where agents are heterogeneous in initial wealth and non-acquired skills. Our economy admits a representative consumer which enables us to characterize distributive dynamics by the evolution of aggregate quantities. We show that inequality in both wealth and income f...

Data on wealth distributions in trading markets show a power law behavior x(-)(1+alpha) at the high end, where, in general, alpha is greater than 1 (Pareto's law). Models based on kinetic theory, where a set of interacting agents trade money, yield power law tails if agents are assigned a saving propensity. In this paper we are solving the inverse problem, that is, in finding the saving propens...

In this paper we consider a canonical stochastic overlapping generations economy with sequentially complete markets. We examine how aggregate and individual shocks translate to changes in the distribution of wealth and how these movements in the wealth distribution affect asset prices and the interest rate. We show that effects are generally small if agents have identical beliefs but that diffe...

■ Abstract Wealth ownership in the United States has long been concentrated in the hands of a small minority of the population, yet researchers have paid relatively little attention to the causes and consequences of this inequality. In this essay, we review the literature that does exist on wealth accumulation and distribution. We begin with an examination of the reasons that wealth inequality ...