Why are people in the richest countries of the world so much richer today than 100 years ago? And why are some countries so much richer than others? Questions such as these define the field of economic growth. This paper documents the facts that underlie these questions. How much richer are we...

Why do the countries of the world display considerable disparity in long term growth rates? This paper examines the hypothesis that the answer lies in differences in national public policies which affect the incentives that individuals have to accumulate capital in both its physical and human...

Compared to a half-century ago, inequality in the United states has risen and measured productivity growth has fallen. Concerns about rising inequality have been exacerbated by the observation that prices of goods consumed by the poor have risen faster than prices of goods consumed by the rich....

This paper develops, calibrates, and simulates a dynamic 88-period OLG model to study the intergenerational transmission of U.S. wealth inequality via bequests. The model features marriage, realistic fertility patterns, random death, assortative mating based on skills, heterogeneous skill...

Using panel data for a sample of households in Utah from 1850 to 1900 we find income and wealth age profiles that are concave and that have a peak within the age distribution of the relevant sample. This finding holds for cross sections at five-year intervals, for pooled cross section...

The purpose of this paper is to outline a set of conditions under which human wealth is an index of well-being in a life cycle as prefatory to empirical estimates earnings and human wealth distributions for the1960 Census population

This paper investigates how, in a heterogeneous agents model with financial frictions, idiosyncratic individual shocks interact with exogenous aggregate shocks to generate time-varying levels of leverage and endogenous aggregate risk. To do so, we show how such a model can be efficiently...

In this paper, I study asset prices in a two-agent macroeconomic model with two key features: limited participation in the stock market and heterogeneity in the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption (EIS). The model is consistent with some prominent features of asset prices...

We study the dynamics of the distribution of overlapping generation economy with finitely lived agents and inter-generational transmission of wealth. Financial markets are incomplete, exposing agents to both labor income and capital income risk. We show that the stationary wealth distribution is...