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,...

There has been much recent research on the world distribution of income, but also growing recognition of the importance of other contributions to well-being, including those of household wealth. Wealth is important in providing security and opportunity, particularly in poorer countries that lack...

We study the distributional consequences of housing price, bond price and equity price increases for Euro Area households using data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). The capital gains from bond price and equity price increases turn out to be concentrated among relatively...

Using agent-based simulation methods we explore the interplay between income distribution, personal insolvency regulations and household borrowing focusing on the effects on macroeconomic dynamics. In order to capture the empirically observed distribution of income and wealth, we model them by...

Much of the focus of the UK pensions policy debate over the past decade has been on the adequacy (or otherwise) of private retirement saving. In this paper, we present the first assessment of the optimality of the retirement resources of English couple households born in the 1940s. Here,...

There is a large body of literature analyzing the onset of the Great Depression or the factors influencing economic recovery in the 1930s, especially the New Deal. The role of income inequality before and during the Great Depression, however, has almost never been discussed thoroughly. This...

Today's dominant strain of macroeconomic models supposes that aggregate consumption can be understood by assuming the existence of a 'representative agent' whose behavior rationalizes observed outcomes. But representative agent models yield embarrassingly implausible (and empirically inaccurate)...

A growing literature explores reasons for rising wealth inequality, but disregards the role of pension systems despite their well-understood infiuence on life-cycle saving. In theory and according to available evidence, both pay-as-you-go (PAYG) and fully-funded (FF) pension schemes crowd out...

Differences in individual wealth holdings are widely viewed as a driving force of economic inequality. However, as this finding relies on cross-section data, we may confuse older with wealthier. We propose a new method to adjust for age effects in cross-sections, which eliminates transitory...

Using new long-run microdata, this article studies wealth and income trends of households with a college degree (college households) and without a college degree (noncollege households) in the United States since 1956. We document the emergence of a substantial college wealth premium since the...