We develop and estimate a life-cycle consumption savings model in which observed genetic variation is allowed to affect wealth accumulation through several distinct channels. We focus on genetic markers that predict educational attainment, aggregated into a predictive index called a polygenic...

Does diversity affect people's perceptions of income distribution and their preferences for redistribution? I leverage variation from a Colombian financial aid reform boosting the share of low-income students at an elite university. Combining college records and original survey data, I study how...

Top income inequality in the United States has increased considerably within occupations. This phenomenon has led to a search for a common explanation. We instead develop a theory where increases in income inequality originating within a few occupations can "spill over" through consumption into...

Heathcote et al. (2010) conducted an empirical analysis of several dimensions of inequality in the United States over the years 1967-2006, using publicly-available survey data. This paper expands the analysis, and extends it to 2021. We find that since the early 2000s, the college wage premium...

We review research on the dynamics and distribution of individual earnings and family income. We start with univariate earnings models, which dominate the literature and are often used as the exogenous component of family income in structural models of saving. We present a version of the linear...

Retirement income security refers to the ability of households to provide an adequate stream of income during the period of their retirement from the labor force. Expected retirement income is based of four components: (i) standard non-pension wealth holdings, (ii) defined contribution (DC)...

Does mental accounting matter for total consumption expenditures? We exploit a unique setting in which individuals exogenously received a new credit card, without requesting one. Using random variation in the time of receipt we show that individuals temporarily increase total consumption...

In this paper we study the neoclassical growth model with idiosyncratic income risk and aggregate risk in which risk sharing is endogenously constrained by one-sided limited commitment. Households can trade a full set of contingent claims that pay off depending on both idiosyncratic and...

We propose a new sorting framework: composite sorting. Composite sorting comprises of (1) distinct worker types assigned to the same occupation, and (2) a given worker type simultaneously being part of both positive and negative sorting. Composite sorting arises when fixed investments mitigate...

Rising wealth inequality has spurred an increased interest in understanding how and why wealth is correlated across generations. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in housing wealth driven by home price changes in different areas to isolate the causal impact of parental housing wealth...