The wealthy hand-to-mouth are households who hold little or no liquid wealth (cash, checking, and savings accounts), despite owning sizable amounts of illiquid assets (assets that carry a transaction cost, such as housing or retirement accounts). We use survey data on household portfolios for...

International trade can have profound effects on domestic institutions. We examine this proposition in the context of medieval Venice circa 800-1350. We show that (initially exogenous) increases in long-distance trade enriched a large group of merchants and these merchants used their new-found...

This paper develops a model where this is a trade-off between the enforcement of the property rights of different groups. An oligarchic' society, where political power is in the hands of major producers, protects their property rights, but also tends to erect significant entry barriers,...

This paper combines national accounts, survey, wealth and fiscal data (including recently released tax data on high-income taxpayers) in order to provide consistent series on the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth in Russia from the Soviet period until the present day. We find...

An extensive literature has documented a robust correlation between socioeconomic status--measured in a variety of ways--and health outcomes; however, much uncertainty remains regarding what causal processes underlie this association. The present paper builds on a growing literature that seeks...

Using data from both the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we found that on average over the period from 1984 to 2007, about one fifth of American households at a given point of time received a wealth transfer and these accounted for about a quarter...

Two competing explanations for why consumers have trouble with financial decisions are gaining momentum. One is that people are financially illiterate since they lack understanding of simple economic concepts and cannot carry out computations such as computing compound interest, which could...

Some commentators have argued that the housing crisis may harm labor markets because homeowners who owe more than their homes are worth are less likely to move to places that have productive job opportunities. I show that, in the available data, negative equity does not make homeowners less...

We develop a consistent and comprehensive theoretical framework for assessing whether economic growth is compatible with sustaining well-being over time. The framework focuses on whether a comprehensive measure of wealth - one that accounts for natural capital and human capital as well as...

This paper uses data from the Health and Retirement Study to explore the mechanism that underlies the robust relation found in the literature between cognitive ability, and in particular numeracy, and wealth, income constant. We have a number of findings. First, the more valuable the pension,...