We study the dynamics of the distribution of overlapping generation economy with finitely lived agents and inter-generational transmission of wealth. Financial markets are incomplete, exposing agents to both labor income and capital income risk. We show that the stationary wealth distribution is a Pareto distribution in the right tail and that it is capital income risk, rather than labor income...

The distributions of income and wealth in countries across the world are found to possess some robust and stable features independent of the specific economic, social and political conditions of the countries. We discuss a few physics-inspired multiagent dynamic models along with their microeconomic counterparts, that can produce the statistical features of the distributions observed in reality...

In the present paper we consider a one-sector growth model in continuous time with a production externality and endogenous labor supply. There is a continuum of households who have identical preferences but differ with respect to their initial wealth. We show that there exist economies such that an indeterminate steady state exists for some wealth distribution but not for others. A second resul...

Modern excavations yielded a distribution of the house areas in the ancient Egyptian city Akhetaten, which was populated for a short period during the 14th century B.C. Assuming that the house area has a power law dependence of the wealth of its inhabitants allows us to make a comparison of the wealth distributions in ancient and modern societies.

In this paper we review some of the computable general equilibrium models based on unin-surable shocks to earnings that can be used to account for diierences in wealth holdings across households. We explore their ability to generate the key properties of the data (which we summarize by (a) a very small amount of wealth among the poorest 40% of the population (about 2% of total wealth), (b) a ve...

We consider a model of occupational choice in large economies where individuals differ in their wealth endowment. Individuals can remain self-employed or engage in productive matches with another individual, i.e., form firms. Matches are subject to a moral hazard problem with limited liability. The division of the gains from such matches is determined by competitive forces. When the incentive p...

Econophysics provides a strategy for understanding the potential mechanisms underlying the anomalous distribution of wealth found in real societies. We present a computational nonlinear stochastic model for the distribution of wealth that depends upon three parameters and two mechanisms: trade and investment. To avoid economic paradoxes, the trade mechanism is assumed to be related to the poore...

We construct a model of wealth distribution, based on an interactive multiplicative stochastic process on static complex networks. Through numerical simulations we show that a decrease in the number of links discourages equality in wealth distribution, while the rewiring of links in small-world networks encourages it. Inequal distributions obey log-normal distributions, which are produced by we...

Wealth Accumulation and Distribution in Urban China Under socialism it was neither possible nor necessary to accumulate significant levels of personal wealth. The acceleration of economic reform in the last decade, however, has brought dramatic increases in income and investment opportunities. Reform has also reduced social protections provided by the state welfare system. In response to these ...

This paper extends the heterogeneous agent overlapping generations model with bequests in Nishiyama (2000) by adding two-way intergenerational altruism and inter vivos transfers. Calibrating the model to the U.S. economy, the paper measures time preference and intergenerational altruism consistent with the economy¶s capital-output ratio and the sizes of intergenerational transfers. In the model...