Durable Goods and the Wealth Distribution (original) (raw)
Related papers
THE WEALTH DISTRIBUTION WITH DURABLE GOODS*
International Economic Review, 2010
In the United States, the distribution of houses is less egalitarian than that of earnings for the total population, but these two distributions are remarkably similar for homeowners. Additionally, housing as a fraction of total wealth decreases with the level of wealth. In order to understand the different factors that account for these wealth composition patterns, we introduce illiquid houses and collateral credit in a general equilibrium model of heterogeneous agents with idiosyncratic uncertainty. A combination of very persistent shocks to earnings, frictions in the housing market, and a rental market is necessary to obtain numbers in line with the evidence. * Manuscript
Precautionary saving and wealth distribution with durable goods
2002
In this paper, we investigate the effects that the explicit consideration of illiquid durable goods and collateral credit have on the level of precautionary saving, the shape of the wealth distribution, and on household wealth portfolio composition. Our model is an otherwise standard heterogeneous agents model economy with idiosyncratic uncertainty. We find that the volume of precautionary savings in our framework is lower than the volume generated in the standard model with only one asset. Also, the explicit modelling of durables brings a modest reduction in the concentration of household's net worth. Nevertheless, the two-asset model presented here has one main advantage over the standard one-asset framework since it allows to study wealth composition issues. In this dimension our model is able to reproduce the main patterns of the U.S. distribution.
The Distribution of Wealth with Uncertain Income
Economica, 2003
It is well known that an uncertain income stream will induce individuals to save if they are forward looking. In this paper we investigate the consequences of such saving upon the distribution of wealth among households. The inquiry is motivated by the fact that both the dispersion of the U.S. wealth distribution and the variance of transitory income have increased in the recent past. Surprisingly, we …nd that an increase in earnings uncertainty is more likely to decrease than increase the inequality in wealth holdings.
Income and Wealth Distributions in a Population of Heterogeneous Agents
2014
This paper develops a simple framework to characterize the distribution of income and wealth in a real business cycle model. Agents are of two types depending on the human factor of production they own and they are located in separated markets, cities. In each city the two types of agent match to produce a composite factor, human service. We show that if the population is an exchangeable sequence of agents' types generated according to a Polya urn then (i) the share of agents' type follows a Beta distribution and (ii) the functional form of the matching function belongs to the family of the constant elasticity of substitution, with agent shares that depend on the composition of the population. We nest this structure into a standard Bewley economy, in which the aggregate supply of human service is combined with physical capital to produce the homogeneous output. Given the results (i)-(ii) we perform the exact aggregation of income, consumption and asset holding across agents,...
Financial Frictions and the Wealth Distribution
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019
This paper investigates how, in a heterogeneous agents model with financial frictions, idiosyncratic individual shocks interact with exogenous aggregate shocks to generate timevarying levels of leverage and endogenous aggregate risk. To do so, we show how such a model can be efficiently computed, despite its substantial nonlinearities, using tools from machine learning. We also illustrate how the model can be structurally estimated with a likelihood function, using tools from inference with diffusions. We document, first, the strong nonlinearities created by financial frictions. Second, we report the existence of multiple stochastic steady states with properties that differ from the deterministic steady state along important dimensions. Third, we illustrate how the generalized impulse response functions of the model are highly state-dependent. In particular, we find that the recovery after a negative aggregate shock is more sluggish when the economy is more leveraged. Fourth, we prove that wealth heterogeneity matters in this economy because of the asymmetric responses of household consumption decisions to aggregate shocks.
The Distribution of Wealth in the Blanchard–Yaari Model
Macroeconomic Dynamics, 2014
We study the dynamics of the distribution of wealth in an economy with infinitely lived agents, intergenerational transmission of wealth, and redistributive fiscal policy. We show that wealth accumulation with idiosyncratic investment risk and uncertain lifetimes can generate a double Pareto wealth distribution.
Topics in Macroeconomics, 2000
This paper studies the business cycle dynamics of the 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 the distributive dynamics by aggregate dynamics. We show that inequality in both wealth and income follows a counter-cyclical pattern: the former is counter-cyclical because of cyclical fluctuations in labor income, while the latter is counter-cyclical due to the wealth-distribution effect.
The Distribution of Wealth: Measurement and Models
Journal of Economic Surveys, 1990
Analysts debating the consequences of a policy change for the wealth distribution may come to different conclusions because of different views about how the distribution should be defined and measured, or about the processes determining the distribution. The aim of this survey is to provide an analytical framework within which such conflicts may be assessed. The first part of the paper discusses conceptual issues in the definition of 'wealth', and compares methods of deriving estimates of wealth distribution. The second, and larger, part of the paper surveys lifecycle and intergenerational models of the distribution of wealth, including a discussion of the role played by inheritance. The presentation is largely theoretical. Indeed, one of the paper's conclusions is that empirical modelling of the wealth distribution is underdeveloped , at least for the purposes of addressing many topical policy issues.
Computational Economics, 2013
This paper describes an accurate, fast and robust fixed point method for computing the stationary wealth distributions in macroeconomic models with a continuum of infinitely-lived households who face idiosyncratic shocks with aggregate certainty. The household wealth evolution is modeled as a mixture Markov process and the stationary wealth distributions are obtained using eigen structures of transition matrices by enforcing the conditions for the Perron-Frobenius theorem by adding a perturbation constant to the Markov transition matrix. This step is utilized repeatedly within a binary search algorithm to find the equilibrium state of the system. The algorithm suggests an efficient and reliable framework for studying dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with heterogeneous agents.