This paper studies the heterogeneity of households’ present bias in a heterogeneous-agent model. Our model jointly matches the average marginal propensities to consume and the wealth distribution in the USA, even when all wealth is liquid. A fiscal stimulus targeting households in the bottom half of the wealth distribution improves the consumption response. A financial literacy campaign removing present bias gets naive households out of the debt trap but harms sophisticated households’ wealth accumulation due to a lower equilibrium interest rate. Finally, we show that a borrowing cost penalty and illiquidity both discipline excessive borrowing and are therefore potential remedies for present bias and naivete.

Motivated by distributional concerns raised by recent breakthroughs in AI and robotics, we ask how workers would prefer to manage an episode of automation in a task-based model, which distinguishes between automation and traditional technical progress. We show that under majority voting with the option to implement a “partial” UBI (as transfers to workers) it is optimal to tax capital at a higher rate than labor in the long run to fund the partial UBI. We show that, unlike traditional technical progress, automation always lowers the labor share in the long run, justifying distributional concerns. A quantitative analysis of an episode of automation for the US economy shows that it is optimal from the workers’ perspective to lower capital taxes and transfers over the transition. Nevertheless, this policy increases worker welfare by only 0.7% in consumption-equivalent terms, compared with a 21.6% welfare gain to entrepreneurs, because the welfare gains to workers from lower capital taxes are second-order, while the gains to entrepreneurs are first-order.

This paper explores whether a positive unexpected exogenous (unearned) wealth shock affects household structure decisions in different Spanish regions. The Christmas draw of the Spanish National Lottery is used in a natural experiment as a proxy for exogenous random variations in provincial wealth. A static and dynamic linear panel event-study design allows for control of changing economic and demographic conditions at the province level and the dynamic effects on the analyzed decisions. The evidence is consistent with families getting divorced and having children when the province in which they live experiences an unexpected increase in wealth, but no conclusive effect on wedding plans is found.

The canonical income process, including autoregressive, transitory, and fixed effect components, is routinely used in macro and labor economics. We provide a guide for its estimation using quasidifferences, cataloging biases in the estimated parameters for various $N$, $T$, initial conditions, and weighting schemes. Using Danish administrative data on male earnings, estimation in quasidifferences yields divergent estimates of the autoregressive parameter for different weighting schemes, which conforms to our simulation results when the variance of transitory shocks is higher than that of persistent shocks, true persistence is high, and the persistent component’s variance in the first sample year is nonzero. We further apply quasidifferences to the data from a calibrated lifecycle model and find significant biases in the persistence of shocks and their insurance. Estimation of the income process using quasidifferences is reliable only when the variance of persistent shocks is higher than that of transitory shocks and the moments are equally weighted.

The rapid widening of wealth inequalities has led to sharp differences in living standards in Great Britain. Understanding whether and separately the rate at which individuals accumulate particular types of wealth by family background is important for improving wealth and social mobility. We show offspring wealth inequality is driven by housing wealth, and holding such wealth is becoming increasingly associated with early life circumstances relating to parental housing tenure and education, even after controlling for adult offspring’s own characteristics. Importantly, we find adult offspring whose parents hold a degree and are homeowners are no less likely to report homeownership and housing wealth compared to older cohorts from the same background. Our findings infer the intergenerational rank correlation in housing wealth is set to double in approximately three decades.

This study uses three wealth modules from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey to explore the gender wealth gap for single Australian households between 2002 and 2010. The findings indicate a significant gender wealth gap, which has increased over the 8 years explored. Most of the increase in the wealth gap was associated with a relatively rapid increase in the value of housing assets by single men over the study period. The findings of this study challenge a wider literature that tends to emphasise that men are more prepared to invest in ‘risky’ assets such as shares and that their higher wealth is due to these investment strategies. Instead, this study emphasises how, in the Australian context at least, it was higher growth rates in the value of housing assets owned by single men that improved their wealth position relative to single women over the last decade.

Australian social policy has seen apparently contradictory developments over the period of economic restructuring. Social spending has increased based on a highly redistributive model while inequality has grown. This article explores the relationship between Australia’s experience of economic restructuring and the political dynamics of an emerging ‘dual welfare state’. Importantly, the article argues that Australian reformers did not reject the state per se, nor egalitarianism as an objective. Instead, reform sought to combine greater competition with compensation, generating larger inequalities in market incomes alongside growing social spending. The article explores how Labor combined neoclassical ideas about competition with a commitment to a ‘small state’ version of social democracy. This did moderate inequalities through the period of restructuring, but it also altered the dynamics of political contestation. The article provides two typologies to understand this political dynamic, arguing forms of marketisation opened the door to a political contest over the nature, rather than the extent, of public provision, while the model of targeting reinforced paternalist tendencies inherent in neoliberal reform.

This study examines the degree of educational assortative mating, its evolution, and its relationship with income inequality in Thailand using national labor force survey data from 1985 to 2016. Since the 1990s, Thailand shows a trend of decreasing educational homogamy, but there is evidence of continuing educational hypergamy in Thai households. Using the semiparametric decomposition method of DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996), the study finds that educational assortative mating has affected changes in household income inequality over time. Furthermore, there exists a negative relationship between income inequality and marital sorting with same education, which contradicts evidence found in developed countries.

Income drops permanently after an involuntary job displacement, but it has never been clear what happens to long run wealth in the USA. Upon displacement, wealth falls 14% relative to workers of the same age and similar education from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Their wealth is still 18% lower 12 years after the event. A standard life cycle model calibrated to US data with permanent decreases in income after displacement behaves differently than these findings. The agents in the model also experience a large drop in wealth but they recover. The biggest culprit for these differences is small and statistically insignificant changes to consumption in the PSID whereas agents in the model decrease their consumption considerably. Extending the model to include habit formation reconciles some of these differences by generating similar long run effects on wealth. This allows for the examination of wealth at death through the lens of the model.

This paper examines how wealth and income inequality dynamics are related to fluctuations in the functional income distribution over the business cycle. In a panel estimation for OECD countries between 1970 and 2016, although inequality is, on average countercyclical and significantly associated with the capital share, one-third of the countries display a pro- or noncyclical relationship. To analyze the observed pattern, we incorporate distributive shocks into an RBC model, where agents are ex ante heterogeneous with respect to wealth and ability. We find that whether wealth and income inequality behave countercyclically or not depends on the elasticity of intertemporal substitution and the persistence of shocks. We match the model to quarterly US data using Bayesian techniques. The parameter estimates point toward a non-monotonic relationship between productivity and inequality fluctuations. On impact, inequality increases in response to TFP shocks but subsequently declines. Furthermore, TFP shocks explain 17% of inequality fluctuations.

We employ a novel approach for analyzing the effects of relative consumption and relative wealth preferences on economic growth. In the pertinent literature, these effects are usually assessed by examining the dependence of the growth rate on the two parameters of the utility function that seem to measure the strength of the relative consumption and the relative wealth motives. Applying our fundamental factor approach, we identify specifications in which the traditional approach yields incorrect qualitative conclusions. The problematic specifications have the common unpleasant property that the parameter that seems to determine the strength of the relative consumption motive actually also affects the elasticity of intertemporal substitution of absolute consumption (and the strength of the relative wealth motive). Since the standard approach is unaware of the additional effect(s), it attributes the total change in the growth rate incorrectly to the change in the strength of the relative consumption motive.

In a novel experimental design, we investigate the impact of exogenous variation in economic growth and inequality on trusting behaviour. In addition to a control with uniform endowment, three treatments were implemented where the initial endowment is exogenously changed to produce inequality and three growth scenarios where average endowments increase (boom), decrease (recession) or remain unaltered (steady state). We find that aggregate trust and trustworthiness both decrease due to the induced heterogeneity in endowments. Also, trust (but not trustworthiness) decreases (increases) due to recessions (booms). The impact of inequality on trust is greatest in a recession and absent in a boom. These aggregate effects are driven mainly by the reactions of those who, after treatment, end up at the bottom of the endowment distribution. These findings are close in sign and in the order of magnitude to those reported in observational studies on the relationship between growth, inequality and trust.

We examine the effect of the partner allowance (PA) in the Dutch pension system on the retirement decisions of couples using administrative data. PA was paid to people who receive the public old-age pension with a partner younger than the state pension age (SPA) and with a low own income. PA worked as a financial incentive to retire earlier, especially for the younger partners. As of 1 April 2015, new old-age pensioners are no longer entitled to this allowance. We estimate the effect of this reform on the retirement behaviour of each spouse. To account for the fact that at the same time, another reform essentially put an end to generous early retirement arrangements, we compare singles and couples. We conclude that PA substantially increased female younger partners' probabilities to exit from part-time employment into retirement close to the older partner's SPA. On the other hand, there is no evidence that male younger partners (either full-time or part-time workers) responded to the PA reform. In addition, PA increased male older partners’ probabilities to retire in the years before reaching their SPA.

I compare pre-tax and post-tax wealth levels and trends after netting out implicit taxes on tax-deferred assets and accrued capital gains. The analysis covers 1983–2016 for net worth (NW) and augmented wealth (AW), which includes pension and Social Security wealth. Netting out implicit taxes substantially reduces growth in mean and median NW and AW. However, the upward trajectory in NW and AW inequality is basically unchanged from using post-tax values. I also introduce bequest wealth, the value of the estate including death benefits. It is notably more equal than NW and has grown faster over time.

This paper explores Alexis de Tocqueville's thought on fiscal political economy as a forerunner of the modern school of preference falsification and rational irrationality in economic decision making. A good part of the literature has misrepresented Tocqueville as an unconditional optimist regarding the future of fiscal moderation under democracy. Yet, although he initially shared the cautious optimism of most classical economists with respect to taxes under extended suffrage, Tocqueville's view turned more pessimistic in the second volume of his Democracy in America. Universal enfranchisement and democratic governments would lead to higher taxes, more intense income redistribution and government control. Under democracy, the continuous search for unconditional equality would eventually jeopardise liberty and economic growth.

The use of a gender-neutral annuity divisor introduces an intra-generational redistribution from short-lived towards long-lived individuals; this entails a transfer of wealth from males to females and from low socioeconomic groups to high socioeconomic groups. With some subpopulations consisting of females from low socioeconomic groups (or males from high groups), the net effect of the redistribution is unclear. The study aims to quantify the lifetime income redistribution of a generic NDC system using two types of divisor – the demographic and the economic – to compute the amount of an initial pension. With this in mind, the redistribution (actuarial fairness) among subpopulations is assessed through the ratio between the present value of expected pensions received and contributions paid. We find that all subgroups of women and men with high educational attainment benefit from the use of the unisex demographic divisor. This paper also shows that the value of the economic divisor depends markedly on population composition. When mortality differentials by gender and level of education are considered, economic divisors are mostly driven by the longevity effect corresponding to gender.

Equity and efficiency are crucial issues behind any tax reform, but they are particularly relevant in countries with high inequality and large shares of poverty. This paper provides a comprehensive socio-economic empirical assessment of Mexico's proposed (and partially implemented) tax reforms in the energy domain, and of a hypothetical partial removal of existing electricity subsidies. Using a rich household income and expenditure survey within the context of a demand system adjustment of non-durable goods, the article provides the public-revenue, environmental and distributional impacts from the simulation of different combinations of energy taxation, subsidy-removal and distributive offsets. The paper also provides detailed ex-ante evidence on the effects of compensatory devices that may contribute to the successful implementation of energy reform packages and significant poverty alleviation in Mexico.

In this article we estimate the relative contributions to the gender pension gap of career duration and income earned at different points along the pension income distribution, as well as the role played by minimum pensions and other partly or wholly non-contributory policies in reducing this gap. Our research covers all retirees in France in 2012 employed in the public or private sector at least once in their lifetimes. We first highlight that at every point in the distribution, the gender pension gap is wider for private-sector retirees than for those in the public sector. This is because public sector careers are less fragmented and because the calculation of the public sector reference wage does not penalize career interruptions so heavily. This relative advantage of women in the public sector is probably an additional factor explaining their over-representation in this sector. Applying the decomposition method proposed by Firpo et al. (2007, 2009), we show that composition differences in the gender pension gap are essentially due to differences in contribution periods and wages, with a smaller effect of career duration in the public sector than in the private. In the first deciles, the gap can be attributed largely to differences in career duration. This effect gradually weakens, and differences in the reference wage become the main explanation. We also show that minimum contributory pensions play an extremely important role in limiting the gender pension gap in the first deciles, essentially in the private sector. Last, we show that in all cases the unexplained share of the pension gap is substantial only at the bottom of the distribution and, to a lesser extent, in the top decile. The unexplained share is generally smaller than the explained one and favours men.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is often treated as shorthand for national economic well-being, even though it was never intended to be; it is a measure of (some) of the marketable output of the economy. This paper reviews several developments in measuring welfare beyond GDP that were recently presented at the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE) annual conference in May 2019. The papers discussed fall into three broad areas. First, a significant amount of work has focused on incorporating information about the distribution of income, consumption and wealth in the national accounts. Second, the effects of digitisation and the growth of the internet highlight the potential value in measuring time use as a measure of welfare. Third, the digital revolution has spawned many new, often ‘free’ goods, the welfare consequences of which are difficult to measure. Other areas, such as government services, are also difficult to measure. Measuring economic welfare properly matters because it affects the decisions made by government and society. GDP does a reasonable job of measuring the marketable output of the economy (which remains important for some policies), but it should be downgraded; more attention should be given to measures that reflect both objective and subjective measures of well-being, and measures that better reflect the heterogeneity of peoples' experiences.

We present novel estimates of Social Security Wealth (SSW) at the individual level based on the SHARE survey. Our estimates are based on a rigorous methodology taking into account country-specific legislations, the earning history and the longevity prospects of individuals. The key advantage over existing estimates is that our measures of SSW are fully comparable across countries. This allows us to construct indexes of the redistribution enacted by the pension systems in Europe. Finally, we provide descriptive evidence of the relationship between SSW and private wealth.