The paper considers the process of discovery for subsoil resources, including both hard minerals and hydrocarbons and estimates its magnitude in recent years, as derived from the sum of extraction and changes in proven reserves. Spurred on by technology change and strong market conditions,...

Countries face both challenges and opportunities in using their extractive industries to achieve more inclusive development - particularly in the developing world. Yet while a large national income can result from resource wealth, it can also be associated with acute social inequality and deep...

Wider participation in stockholding is often presumed to reduce wealth inequality. We measure and decompose changes in US wealth inequality between 1989 and 2001, a period of considerable spread of equity culture. Inequality in equity wealth is found to be important for net wealth inequality,...

In a model calibrated to match micro- and macroeconomic evidence on household income dynamics, we show that a modest degree of heterogeneity in household preferences or beliefs is sufficient to match empirical measures of wealth inequality in the United States. The heterogeneity-augmented...

In the United States, the employment rate is nearly flat across wealth quintiles with the exception of the first quintile. Correlations between wealth and employment are close to zero or moderately positive. However, incomplete markets models with a standard utility function counterfactually...

Over the recent decades, wide-spread automation has led to a shift of the US labor force from occupations intensive in routine tasks into occupations intensive in manual and abstract tasks. I integrate routine-biased technological change into an incomplete markets model with occupation-specific...

We use new population-wide register data on inheritances and wealth in Sweden to estimate the causal impact of inheritances on wealth inequality. We find that inheritances reduce relative wealth inequality (e.g., the Gini coefficient falls by 5-10 percent) but that absolute dispersion increases....

During the period from 1990 to 2002, U.S. households experienced a dramatic wealth cycle, induced by a 369-percent appreciation in the value of real per capita liquid stock-market assets, followed by a 55-percent decline. However, despite predictions at the time by some analysts relying on...

Since the work of Doepke and Schneider (2006a) and Meh and Terajima (2008), we know that inflation causes major redistribution of wealth between households and the government, between nationals and foreigners, and between households within the same country. Two types of monetary policy,...

This paper finds that individuals in Japan do not leave very significant bequests, that parents often require a quid pro quo for bequests to their children, and that wealthier individuals leave less bequests, meaning that bequests ameliorate wealth inequalities. -- Bequests ; Inheritances ;...