This paper investigates the effect of private pensions on the retirement wealth distribution. The model incorporates stochastic private pension coverage into a lifecycle model with stochastic earnings. The predictions of the calibrated model are compared to the distribution of retirement net...

This paper argues that an increase in the inequality of wealth prompts a stronger quest for status that in turn fosters the accumulation of wealth. It proposes a measure for an individual's want of social status. For a given level of a population's wealth, the corresponding aggregate measure of...

Influenced by a major tax reform in the beginning of the 1990s and by the exceptional boom in the stock market at the end of this decade the level as well as the inequality of the wealth of Swedish households have increased. The large baby-boom cohorts of the 1940s have been successful in...

Reviewing trends in the Swedish distribution of wealth it is demonstrated that the baby-boom cohorts have become relatively wealthy, both in terms of private wealth and in claims on the pension system. Results from a simulation model suggest that the elderly in the future will no longer belong...

Given differences in public saving programs between Sweden and the United States, an examination of household private wealth accumulation in these two countries can be enlightening. In this paper we examine wealth inequality and mobility in Sweden and the United States over the past decade. We...

This paper focuses on three issues. First, it analyses the increasing inequality of wealth in Sweden in terms of percentile age and birth cohort differences. Second, it discusses mobility of wealth as a function of age, length of the transition period, the magnitude of quantile differences, and...

The definition and operationalization of wealth information in population surveys and the corresponding microdata requires a wide range of more or less normative assumptions. However, the decisions made in both the pre- and post-data-collection stage may interfere considerably with the...

Welfare-oriented analyses of economic outcome measures such as income and wealth generally rest on the assumption of pooled and equally shared resources among all household members. Yet the lack of individual-level data hampers the distribution of income and wealth within the household context....

Who is wealthy? This paper presents empirical estimates of household movements into and out of the top percents of the wealth distribution over individual life cycles. There are life-cycle motives and precautionary motives for wealth accumulation. The opportunities to accumulate wealth create...

Recent work on inequality has examined either changes in the distribution of income or in that of earnings, without examining how the latter affects the former. In this paper we perform a factor decomposition of income inequality in order to assess the importance of earnings and income from...