Different models of capital exchange among economic agents have been proposed recently trying to explain the emergence of Pareto’s wealth power law distribution. One important factor to be considered is the existence of risk aversion. In this paper we study a model where agents posses different levels of risk aversion, going from uniform to a random distribution. In all cases the risk aversion ...

Using restricted firm level data from the Kauffman Firm Survey, I document that (a) the distribution of average returns to capital amongst nascent entrepreneurial firms is left skewed, and (b) has higher persistence in the left tail than the right. I find that a model where the entrepreneur’s capital investment is illiquid can largely rationalize this data. On average, a continuing entrepreneur...

Abstract. We introduce and discuss a kinetic model for wealth distribution in a simple market economy which is built of a number of countries or social groups. Our approach is based on the model with risky investments introduced by Cordier, Pareschi and one of the authors in [13] and borrows ideas from the kinetic theory of mixtures of rarefied gases. Wealth is exchanged by individuals inside t...

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...

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 ...

Housing wealth is the largest source of household wealth, but we know little about the distribution of housing wealth and how institutions have shaped this distribution. Subsidies for homeownership, privatisation of social housing and mortgage finance liberalisation are likely to have influenced the distribution of housing wealth in recent decades. To examine their impact, we describe housing w...

Researchers, analysts and policymakers who are concerned with economic inequality, family financial security, and poverty in the USA used to focus their analysis entirely on income and consumption. Today, the importance of wealth and asset holdings—not just income streams—in ensuring and maintaining economic well-being is widely recognized. With this shift in understanding, measures of economic...

Changes in labor markets over the past 30 years suggest upcoming changes in the distribution of wealth at retirement. Workers from the baby boom cohort have spent the majority of their working years in a labor market with substantially higher earnings inequality than previous generations. This paper investigates how changes in lifetime earnings distributions affect the distribution of retiremen...

The inequality of wealth distribution is a universal phenomenon in civilized nations and it is often imputed to the Matthew effect, that is, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Some philosophers unjustified this phenomenon and tried to put the human civilization upon the evenness of wealth. Noticing the facts that 1) the emergence of centralism is the starting point of human civilizati...

Recent evidence suggests that Americans underestimate wealth inequality in the United States and favor a more equal wealth distribution (Norton & Ariely, 2011). Does this pattern reflect ideological dynamics unique to the United States, or is the phenomenon evident in other developed economies—such as Australia? We assessed Australians’ perceived and ideal wealth distributions and compared them...