Private wealth is a crucial factor for the economic well-being of households. Key determinants of private wealth include intergenerational wealth transfers (gifts and inheritances), which are gaining importance since 1990, as research suggests. We conduct a detailed investigation of the...

Poverty trap models are dynamical systems with more than one attractor. Similar dynamical systems arise in optimal growth and macroeconomic models. These systems are often studied empirically by ad hoc methods relying on intuition from deterministic systems, such as looking for multiple peaks in...

This paper uses SOEP data to study the distributional effect of intergenerational transfers on the wealth distribution of German households. Similar to most other central European countries, Germany is likely to face a period of increasing aggregate bequest flows. At the same time, there is an...

This paper provides the first in-depth investigation into the evolution of the wealth gap between CCP and non-CCP households in urban China from 1995 to 2017. We apply unconditional quantile regression (UQR) to analyze the variations in the premiums of party membership across the wealth...

Using a newly constructed panel dataset of German enterprises, I estimate R&D and capital investment equations for the time period from 1990 to 1994. Simple accelerator specifications indicate considerable sensitivity of R&D and investment to cash flow for relatively small firms. Much of this...

We utilize a new survey experiment to evaluate the existence and degree of financial constraints for R&D in the economy. The experiment does not only allow to deduct the presence of financial constraints, but also to evaluate their economic significance. Using data on German companies, we find...