The inheritance tax is often seen as an effective tool to reduce wealth inequality, to raise public budgets if needed, and to increase incentives to work by lowering the tax burden on labour, which is especially high in Germany according to the OECD. The purpose of this paper is therefore to...

Economic growth varies substantially across regions and over time. This paper shows that economic growth in a person's birth place is an important determinant for wealth in adulthood. We exploit a new dataset that oversamples wealthy individuals in Germany and includes information on birth...

We develop a general equilibrium model of earnings, income and wealth heterogeneity in continuous time. We extend existing analytical and numerical methods to solve the model. We calibrate the model to U.S. data and find that stochastic interest rates provide a mechanism to link earnings, income...

The article is concerned with understanding the impact of social preferences and wealth inequality on aggregate economic outcomes. We investigate how different manifestations of other-regarding preferences affect incentive contracts at the microeconomic level and how these in turn translate into...

Top distributions of income and wealth are still incompletely measured in many national statistics, particularly when using survey data. This paper develops the technique of incorporating the joint distributional relationship to enhance the estimation of these two top distributions. We leverage...

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...

The upward sloping trend of rents and house prices has initiated a debate on the consequences of surging housing costs for wealth inequality and welfare. We employ a frictionless two-sectoral macroeconomic model with a housing sector to investigate the dynamics of wealth inequality and the...

Using micro-level data coming from household surveys over 5 years, from 2013 to 2017, we analyse what are the determinants of mobile broadband adoption in developing economies. We provide empirical evidence on the presence of a learning effect stemming from mobile money use, which by providing a...