Wealth Distribution and Social Mobility in the US: A Quantitative Approach
By Jess Benhabib, Alberto Bisin, Mi (Meg) Luo. The American Economic Review, 2015
176 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We quantitatively identify the factors that drive wealth dynamics in the United States and are consistent with its skewed cross-sectional distribution and with social mobility. We concentrate on three critical factors: (i) skewed earnings, (ii) differential saving rates across wealth levels, and (iii) stochastic idiosyncratic returns to wealth. All of these are fundamental for matching both distribution and mobility. The stochastic process for returns which best fits the cross-sectional distribution of wealth and social mobility in the United States shares several statistical properties with those of the returns to wealth uncovered by Fagereng et al. (2017) from tax records in Norway. (JEL D31, E13, E21, E25)
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/992dada96f7f4296ca3afcf8038a9f64420d79ff
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
- Jess Benhabib
- Alberto Bisin
- Thomas Blanchet
- Julie Fournier
- Thomas Piketty
- Emmanuel Saez
- G. Zucman
- Stefanie Stantcheva
In Sociology and Political Science
- Jess Benhabib
- Alberto Bisin
- Thomas Blanchet
- Julie Fournier
- Thomas Piketty
- Emmanuel Saez
- Eckhard Hein
- G. Zucman
Citations in the corpus
- Saving and Wealth Inequality (2017, unknown): “Blundell et al. (2008) use data on both consumption and income to draw inference on the persistence of income shocks.”
- Skewed Wealth Distributions: Theory and Empirics (2018, methodology): “Atkinson’s approach to nonhomogeneous bequest is adopted by Benhabib, Bisin, and Luo (2015) to structurally identify the empirical relevance of a savings rate increasing in wealth in order to match the distribution of wealth.”
- Heterogeneity and Persistence in Returns to Wealth (2018, unknown): “But this is because Benhabib, Bisin, and Luo (2019) impose tight borrowing constraints, inducing too little borrowing that counterfactually increases the returns at the bottom of the net worth distribution compressing heterogeneity in returns (and inflating the estimated shares of wealth at the…”
- Generalized Pareto Curves: Theory and Applications (2017, background): “Benhabib, Bisin, and Luo (2015) study a model where saving rates increase in wealth because the bequest function is more elastic than the utility of consumption.”