The paper shows explicitly how the overlapping of groups impacts between-group inequality by generalizing a result on the group-wise decomposition of the Gini index to more than two groups. It is demonstrated that the ratio of Yitzhaki’s measure of between-group inequality to the conventional...

A bottom poor sensitive Gini coefficient (pgini) is defined by replacing income observations with their reciprocal values in the Gini coefficient. The underlying true income share function can be derived approximately using the maximum entropy method given the pgini coefficient.

Kimball (1990a,b) established that income risk increases the marginal propensity to consume if and only if absolute prudence decreases. We characterize decreasing and increasing multivariate prudence and show that a multidimensional risk increases the marginal propensity to consume if and only...

In this paper, we consider a finite-horizon model with the time-additive utility and the time varying discount rate. With the assumption of the concavity of absolute risk tolerance, the concavity of the consumption function has been proved. This result significantly broadens the conclusion of...

Based on the HRS, I find strong dissaving of nursing home residents and a significant overestimation of U.S. saving rates from age 75 onwards if nursing home residents are excluded as in most micro datasets.

This letter develops a set of simple conditions under which an individual is willing to save an extra amount of money due to the presence of ambiguity concerning his second period wealth. This extra precautionary saving motive is naturally associated with the notion of ambiguity prudence.

This paper provides the closed form solution for the standard model of endogenous growth when consumers have present-biased preferences and make time-inconsistent savings plans, which they revise continuously. It is shown that long-run growth is not necessarily lower under present-biased...

This paper structurally estimates the Capitalist Spirit Model, in which utility derives from direct preferences for wealth. Its results support the hypothesis that wealth accumulation is a luxury good, by showing that the marginal utility from wealth declines more slowly than that from consumption.

We provide evidence on life-cycle and business-cycle fluctuations in the dispersion of household-level wage innovations, comparing the US, the UK, and Germany. First, we find that household characteristics explain about 25% of the dispersion in wages within an age group in all three countries....

In this letter, we overcome the existing shortages with respect to the assignment of individuals to reference groups and are the first to show that individual aversion to relative deprivation plays a decisive role in shaping migration preferences.