Download or read book Implications of Wealth Heterogeneity for Macroeconomics written by Chris Carroll and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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) descriptions of consumption behavior. When push comes to shove, real-world forecasters (including those at the Fed) properly disregard these implications. As a result, consumption forecasting remains very much a seat-of-the-pants enterprise. I will argue that if the representative agent assumption is replaced with a model that generates wealth heterogeneity that matches the empirical data, the improved model can provide a sensible analysis of economic questions like "What might the consumption response be to economic stimulus payments?"--Microfoundations ; Wealth Inequality ; Marginal Propensity to Consume

Download or read book Heterogeneity and Persistence in Returns to Wealth written by Andreas Fagereng and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2018-07-27 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We provide a systematic analysis of the properties of individual returns to wealth using twelve years of population data from Norway’s administrative tax records. We document a number of novel results. First, during our sample period individuals earn markedly different average returns on their financial assets (a standard deviation of 14%) and on their net worth (a standard deviation of 8%). Second, heterogeneity in returns does not arise merely from differences in the allocation of wealth between safe and risky assets: returns are heterogeneous even within asset classes. Third, returns are positively correlated with wealth: moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile of the financial wealth distribution increases the return by 3 percentage points - and by 17 percentage points when the same exercise is performed for the return to net worth. Fourth, wealth returns exhibit substantial persistence over time. We argue that while this persistence partly reflects stable differences in risk exposure and assets scale, it also reflects persistent heterogeneity in sophistication and financial information, as well as entrepreneurial talent. Finally, wealth returns are (mildly) correlated across generations. We discuss the implications of these findings for several strands of the wealth inequality debate.

Download or read book Heterogeneity and Persistence in Returns to Wealth written by Andreas Fagereng and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2018-07-27 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We provide a systematic analysis of the properties of individual returns to wealth using twelve years of population data from Norway’s administrative tax records. We document a number of novel results. First, during our sample period individuals earn markedly different average returns on their financial assets (a standard deviation of 14%) and on their net worth (a standard deviation of 8%). Second, heterogeneity in returns does not arise merely from differences in the allocation of wealth between safe and risky assets: returns are heterogeneous even within asset classes. Third, returns are positively correlated with wealth: moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile of the financial wealth distribution increases the return by 3 percentage points - and by 17 percentage points when the same exercise is performed for the return to net worth. Fourth, wealth returns exhibit substantial persistence over time. We argue that while this persistence partly reflects stable differences in risk exposure and assets scale, it also reflects persistent heterogeneity in sophistication and financial information, as well as entrepreneurial talent. Finally, wealth returns are (mildly) correlated across generations. We discuss the implications of these findings for several strands of the wealth inequality debate.

Download or read book Income Distribution in Macroeconomic Models written by Giuseppe Bertola and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-28 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at the distribution of income and wealth and the effects that this has on the macroeconomy, and vice versa. Is a more equal distribution of income beneficial or harmful for macroeconomic growth, and how does the distribution of wealth evolve in a market economy? Taking stock of results and methods developed in the context of the 1990s revival of growth theory, the authors focus on capital accumulation and long-run growth. They show how rigorous, optimization-based technical tools can be applied, beyond the representative-agent framework of analysis, to account for realistic market imperfections and for political-economic interactions. The treatment is thorough, yet accessible to students and nonspecialist economists, and it offers specialist readers a wide-ranging and innovative treatment of an increasingly important research field. The book follows a single analytical thread through a series of different growth models, allowing readers to appreciate their structure and crucial assumptions. This is particularly useful at a time when the literature on income distribution and growth has developed quickly and in several different directions, becoming difficult to overview.

Download or read book The Implications of Heterogeneity and Inequality for Asset Pricing written by Stavros Panageas and published by Now Publishers. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Implications of Heterogeneity and Inequality for Asset Pricing provides a unified framework to better understand this large literature and to reconcile several of the seemingly inconsistent results found in some seminal papers.

Download or read book Essays on Macroeconomics with Heterogeneity and Inequality written by Zhigang Ge and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract Chapter 1. Heterogeneous Entrepreneurial Ability and Wealth Inequality Models with entrepreneurship can reproduce high wealth concentration at the top. The key assumption is the borrowing constraint, that is, households are unable to borrow enough assets to start a business or invest optimally in the business. However, some empirical evidences show that borrowing constraint does not matter for the majority of households in the US. This paper seeks to generate high wealth concentration at the top without assuming borrowing constraint. The baseline model that introduces heterogeneity in entrepreneurial ability is able to match the wealth distribution while the model assuming same entrepreneurial ability fails. Besides wealth distribution, the baseline model generates other moments that are consistent with the data. Chapter 2. Taxing Top Earners: The Role of Entrepreneurs This paper studies the optimal top marginal income tax rate in a quantitative framework with entrepreneurial choice, financing constraints, and realistic earnings and wealth distributions. I find that the revenue-maximizing top tax rate is approximately 41 percent -- close to the recent levels in the US. In contrast, when calibrated with only workers to match realistic earnings and wealth distributions, the model predicts a revenue-maximizing top tax rate of 81 percent -- close to the established view. There are two channels through which the baseline model has a lower revenue-maximizing top tax rate. First, the wealth distribution channel: increasing the top tax rate decreases wealth accumulation and leads to a less skewed wealth distribution in the long run (there are more top entrepreneurs with low wealth and less top entrepreneurs with high wealth). With financing constraints, there is a similar change in the business earnings distribution, implying a fall in the average business earnings at the top. Second, the general equilibrium effect on labor earnings of workers: in the model with entrepreneurs, increasing the top tax rate reduces the capital stock much more than labor supply, which decreases the capital-labor ratio and thus the equilibrium wage rate in the model economy. Finally, I find that the welfare-maximizing top marginal income tax rate is close to the revenue-maximizing one. Chapter 3. Household Heterogeneity and Consumption Amplification Macroeconomic models with household heterogeneity in wealth can generate larger consumption response to aggregate shocks compared to a representative-agent economy. In other words, there is consumption amplification associated with wealth heterogeneity. However, I find that in a Krusell-Smith type real business cycle (RBC) model, this amplification effect is only significant at the onset of a recession and gradually dies out as the recession proceeds. The finding is of interest because part of the motivation for the widely adoption of models with wealth heterogeneity is their different and empirically plausible implications for consumption dynamics compared with representative-agent models. I then introduce household heterogeneity in housing and find that the model with housing has more persistent amplification effect on consumption during the recession.

Download or read book Unequal We Stand written by Jonathan Heathcote and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2010-10 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors conducted a systematic empirical study of cross-sectional inequality in the U.S., integrating data from various surveys. The authors follow the mapping suggested by the household budget constraint from individual wages to individual earnings, to household earnings, to disposable income, and, ultimately, to consumption and wealth. They document a continuous and sizable increase in wage inequality over the sample period. Changes in the distribution of hours worked sharpen the rise in earnings inequality before 1982, but mitigate its increase thereafter. Taxes and transfers compress the level of income inequality, especially at the bottom of the distribution, but have little effect on the overall trend. Charts and tables. This is a print-on-demand publication; it is not an original.

Download or read book Macroeconomics and Household Heterogeneity written by Dirk Krueger and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The goal of this chapter is to study how, and by how much, household income, wealth, and preference heterogeneity amplify and propagate a macroeconomic shock. We focus on the U.S. Great Recession of 2007-2009 and proceed in two steps. First, using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we document the patterns of household income, consumption and wealth inequality before and during the Great Recession. We then investigate how households in different segments of the wealth distribution were affected by income declines, and how they changed their expenditures differentially during the aggregate downturn. Motivated by this evidence, we study several variants of a standard heterogeneous household model with aggregate shocks and an endogenous cross-sectional wealth distribution. Our key finding is that wealth inequality can significantly amplify the impact of an aggregate shock, and it does so if the distribution features a sufficiently large fraction of households with very little net worth that sharply increase their saving (i.e. they are not hand-to mouth) as the recession hits. We document that both these features are observed in the PSID. We also investigate the role that social insurance policies, such as unemployment insurance, play in shaping the cross-sectional income and wealth distribution, and through it, the dynamics of business cycles.

Download or read book Essays in Heterogeneous Agent Macroeconomics written by Nobuhide Okahata and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these essays, I study the implications of macroeconomic policies under the environment with rich heterogeneities of economic agents. The analyses in these essays highlight that income and wealth inequality among agents could change the responses of macroeconomic policies and large aggregate shocks from those in the representative agent models. These results could modify our understanding of economic dynamics and the effect of macroeconomic policies. As an illustration, I focus on the monetary policy in a closed economy model and capital controls in an open economy model. I also develop a new nonlinear and global numerical solution method to analyze a class of heterogeneous-agent macroeconomic models. In the first chapter, ''An Alternative Solution Method for Continuous-Time Heterogeneous Agent Models with Aggregate Shocks'', I propose an alternative solution method for continuous-time heterogeneous agent models with aggregate shocks by extending the Backward Induction method developed initially for discrete-time models by Reiter (2010). The existing methods commonly used in the literature essentially rely on the local linearization and are only applicable to the problems where certainty equivalence with respect to aggregate shocks holds. On the other hand, the proposed method is nonlinear and global with respect to both idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks and thus suitable to investigate models where large aggregate shocks exist or nonlinearity matters. I apply this method to solve a Krusell and Smith (1998) economy and evaluate its performance along two dimensions: accuracy and computation speed. I find that the proposed method is accurate even with large aggregate shocks and high curvature without surrendering computation speed (the baseline economy is solved within a few seconds). This new method is also applied to a model with recursive utility and an Overlapping Generations (OLG) model, and it is able to solve both models quickly and accurately. In the second chapter, ''Consumption Inequality and Monetary Policy in a Heterogeneous-Agent New Keynesian Model'', I consider a continuous-time heterogenous-agent New Keynesian model with the wealth effect of the labor supply and study quantitative implications of additional insurance mechanisms available to the households. Our numerical experiment illustrates cross-sectional consumption inequality increases after a contractionary monetary policy shock which is consistent with the previous empirical result while it contradicts with predictions of the model without the wealth effect of the labor supply. Furthermore, consumption response to contractionary monetary policy shock is dampened, and a cross-sectional average of utilities decreases while the opposite is true in the model without wealth effect. These results suggest that propagation of monetary policy shock to the aggregate variables and welfare depends critically on additional insurance instruments available to agents. The third chapter, ''Capital Controls under Income Heterogeneity'', studies the welfare implication of capital controls under the small open economy model with the idiosyncratic income risks and the borrowing constraints. A calibrated model computes the change in welfare for different levels of capital controls. Compared to the recent studies, welfare gain of capital controls becomes small under agent income heterogeneity. For the economy with low borrowing capacity, capital controls become more effective compared to the baseline case.

Download or read book The Economics of Consumption written by Tullio Jappelli and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Economics of Consumption, Tullio Jappelli and Luigi Pistaferri provide a comprehensive examination of the most important developments in the field of consumption decisions and evaluate economic models against empirical evidence.

Download or read book Information and Wealth Heterogeneity in the Macroeconomy written by Tobías Broer and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We document systematic differences in macroeconomic expectations across U.S. households and rationalize our findings with a theory of information choice. We embed this theory into an incomplete-markets model with aggregate risk. Our model is quantitatively consistent with the pattern of expectation heterogeneity in the data. Relative to a full-information counterpart, our model implies substantially increased macroeconomic volatility and inequality. We show through the example of a wealth tax that neglecting the information channel leads to erroneous conclusions about the effects of policies. While in the model without information choice a wealth tax reduces wealth inequality, in our framework it reduces information acquired in the economy, leading to increased volatility and higher wealth inequality in equilibrium.

Download or read book NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2017 written by Martin Eichenbaum and published by University of Chicago Press Journals. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume 32 of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual features six theoretical and empirical studies of important issues in contemporary macroeconomics, and a keynote address by former IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard. In one study, SeHyoun Ahn, Greg Kaplan, Benjamin Moll, Thomas Winberry, and Christian Wolf examine the dynamics of consumption expenditures in non-representative-agent macroeconomic models. In another, John Cochrane asks which macro models most naturally explain the post-financial-crisis macroeconomic environment, which is characterized by the co-existence of low and nonvolatile inflation rates, near-zero short-term interest rates, and an explosion in monetary aggregates. Manuel Adelino, Antoinette Schoar, and Felipe Severino examine the causes of the lending boom that precipitated the recent U.S. financial crisis and Great Recession. Steven Durlauf and Ananth Seshadri investigate whether increases in income inequality cause lower levels of economic mobility and opportunity. Charles Manski explores the formation of expectations, considering the efficacy of directly measuring beliefs through surveys as an alternative to making the assumption of rational expectations. In the final research paper, Efraim Benmelech and Nittai Bergman analyze the sharp declines in debt issuance and the evaporation of market liquidity that coincide with most financial crises. Blanchard’s keynote address discusses which distortions are central to understanding short-run macroeconomic fluctuations.

Download or read book Macroeconomic Policies and Agent Heterogeneity written by Charles Gottlieb and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis contributes to the understanding of macroeconomic policies' impact on the distribution of wealth. It belongs to the strand of literature that departs from the representative agent assumption and perceives agent heterogeneity and the induced disparities in wealth accumulation, as an important dimension of economic policy-making. Within such economic environment, this thesis analyses the impact of three macroeconomic policies, namely monetary policy under the form of inflation targeting, fiscal policy under the form of asymmetric transfers, and finally retirement policies by shedding light on how household allocate their financial wealth over the life cycle. The first chapter of this thesis explores whether a higher inflation target induces more households to hold real assets rather than money holdings, thereby leading to a higher aggregate capital stock. It shows that a higher inflation target can lead to welfare improvements, when the economy is parametrized to US data. Such policy shows to be welfare improving, as the higher stock of aggregate capital reduces the real interest rate, which improves the welfare of indebted households. The second chapter of this thesis is joint work with A. Fagereng and L. Guiso. It provides novel empirical evidence on the life cycle patterns of the extensive and the intensive margin of stock market participation over the life-cycle. Also we provide a model that replicates the life cycle patterns of the conditional risky share and the participation rate, by introducing a fixed per period cost friction and a limited trust friction. In the third chapter, co-authored with M. Froemel, we analyse whether asymmetric transfer policies can be a pertinent short run policy instrument to overcome distortions arising from the lack of insurance opportunities for households due to financial market incompleteness. We show that asymmetric transfers can improve welfare, when transfer programs are pro-borrowers rather than lump-sum or pro-lenders.

Download or read book Recursive Macroeconomic Theory written by Lars Ljungqvist and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 1120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A significant new edition of a text that offers both tools and sample applications; extensive revisions and seven new chapters improve and expand upon the original treatment.

Download or read book Understanding Consumption written by Angus Deaton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overview of the saving and consumption patterns of households

Download or read book Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality written by Ms.Era Dabla-Norris and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper analyzes the extent of income inequality from a global perspective, its drivers, and what to do about it. The drivers of inequality vary widely amongst countries, with some common drivers being the skill premium associated with technical change and globalization, weakening protection for labor, and lack of financial inclusion in developing countries. We find that increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down. This suggests that policies need to be country specific but should focus on raising the income share of the poor, and ensuring there is no hollowing out of the middle class. To tackle inequality, financial inclusion is imperative in emerging and developing countries while in advanced economies, policies should focus on raising human capital and skills and making tax systems more progressive.

Download or read book Essays on Household Heterogeneity in Macroeconomics written by Lukas Nord and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis contains four independent essays studying the consequences of household heterogeneity for Macroeconomics. The first chapter studies the implications of household heterogeneity for equilibrium prices. I break with the canonical assumptions of homothetic preferences and the law of one price to show how heterogeneity in consumption baskets and search for price bargains affects posted prices. Analytical results from search theory and empirical evidence from big data on households' grocery transactions show that price distributions respond to the composition of buyers. In a quantitative heterogeneous agent model with endogenous price dispersion for multiple varieties, I find that the response of retailers to households' search effort is quantitatively important to differentiate between inequality in expenditure and consumption. It more than doubles the direct effect of paying more or less given posted prices, which has been the focus of previous literature. Furthermore, I find that household heterogeneity helps to account for the empirical cyclicality of retail prices and markups in response to aggregate shocks, and has implications for the response of prices to redistributive policies. In the second chapter, which is joint work with Annika Bacher and Philipp Grübener, we show how households with two members can insure themselves against the job loss of a primary earner through the labor force entry of a nonparticipating spouse. We document empirically that this margin is predominantly used by young households. In a two-member life cycle model with endogenous arrival rates, human capital accumulation, and extensive-margin labor supply, we explore how differences in labor market opportunities and asset holdings contribute to this pattern. Our findings suggest that the age difference is predominantly explained by better insurance through asset holdings for the old, while differences in arrival rates and human capital play a smaller role. In the third chapter, which is joint work with Caterina Mendicino and Marcel Peruffo, we study differences in the exposure to bank distress along the income distribution. We develop a two-asset heterogeneous agent model with a financial sector and use this framework to show that banking sector losses disproportionately harm low-income households while rich households adjust their savings behavior to profit from fluctuations in asset prices. This is why welfare losses from bank distress are considerably more dispersed than consumption responses. We find the model-implied consumption responses to be in line with empirical evidence on the relationship between bank equity returns and consumption across households. In the forth chapter, I study how wealth holdings can affect households' incentives to form precise expectations about future inflation rates. I document empirically how the dispersion of expectations changes along the wealth distribution and develop a consumption-savings model with costly expectation formation to study implications for the effectiveness of forward guidance policies. I show endogenous expectation formation to significantly lower the effectiveness of forward guidance policies due to selection in which households are paying attention to news about inflation.