Equity mutual fund loads have fallen, while stock ownership rates and equity mutual fund use have risen, plausibly boosting the stock wealth elasticity of U.S. consumption. Because of limited wealth and diversification needs, load declines likely spurred middle-income families to invest in equity, consistent with cross-section data and the calibration model of Heaton and Lucas (2000). In load-m...

This article argues that public health researchers have often ignored the analysis of wealth in the quest to understand the social determinants of health. Wealth concentration and the inequities in wealth between and within countries are increasing. Despite this scare accurate data are available to assist the analysis of the health impact of this trend. Improved data collection on wealth distri...

This paper investigates some major changes in the wealth distribution in China using the data from two national household surveys conducted in 1995 and 2002. The surveys collected rich information on household wealth and its components, enabling a detailed analysis of changes in wealth distribution among Chinese households. Our analysis indicates that the wealth distribution in China as a whole...

by Audra T. Wenzlow, John Mullahy, Stephanie A. Robert, and Barbara L. Wolfe We explore the relationship between health and wealth and between health and income using the Survey of Consumer Finances. We focus on the working-age population, describing the shape of the health-income and health-wealth gradients for individuals between ages 25 and 54. We find that the health-wealth relationship is ...

Reproductive success and survival are influenced by wealth in human populations. Wealth is transmitted to offsprings and strategies of transmission vary over time and among populations, the main variation being how equally wealth is transmitted to children. Here we propose a model where we simulate both the dynamics of wealth in a population and the evolution of a trait that determines how weal...

We investigate the relationship between housing wealth, property taxes, and elderly labor supply. Using twenty years of restricted access data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) containing plausibly exogenous variation in housing wealth from the recent boom/bust cycle and MSA-specific housing price indexes, we estimate longitudinal and difference-in-difference models. Our findings sugge...

Wealth accumulation has important implications for the relative well-being of households. This article describes how household wealth in the United States varies by gender and family type. Evidence is found of large differences in observed wealth between single-female-headed households and married couples. Although some of this gap reflects differences in observable characteristics correlated w...

To date, studies of wealth effects on consumption have mainly used aggregate wealth definitions on a single-country basis. This study seeks to break new ground by analysing disaggregated financial wealth in consumption functions for G7 countries. Contrary to earlier empirical work, we find that illiquid financial wealth (i.e. securities, pensions and mortgage debt) tends to be a more important ...

This paper characterizes the relationship between entrepreneurial wealth and aggregate investment under adverse selection. Its main finding is that such a relationship need not be monotonic. In particular, three results emerge from the analysis: (i) pooling equilibria, in which investment is independent of entrepreneurial wealth, are more likely to arise when entrepreneurial wealth is relativel...

We solve a portfolio selection problem of an investor with a deterministic savings plan who aims to have a target wealth value at retirement. The investor is an expected power utility-maximizer. The target wealth value is the maximum wealth that the investor can have at retirement. By constraining the investor to have no more than the target wealth at retirement, we find that the lower quantile...