Search Results
Working Paper
Mobility
This paper studies short-run wealth mobility in a heterogeneous agents, incomplete-markets model. Wealth mobility has a ?hump-shaped? relationship with the persistence of the stochastic process governing labor income: low when shocks are close to i.i.d. or close to a random walk, and higher in between. The standard incomplete markets framework features less wealth mobility than found in the PSID wealth supplements. We include features commonly used in the literature to capture wealth inequality and find that they do little to improve the model?s performance for wealth mobility. Finally, we ...
Report
The Life-Cycle Dynamics of Wealth Mobility
We use twenty-five years of tax records for the Norwegian population to study the mobility of wealth over people’s lifetimes. We find considerable wealth mobility over the life cycle. To understand the underlying mobility patterns, we group individuals with similar wealth rank histories using agglomerative hierarchical clustering, a tool from statistical learning. The mobility patterns we elicit provide evidence of segmented mobility. Over 60 percent of the population remains at the top or bottom of the wealth distribution throughout their lives. Mobility is driven by the remaining 40 ...
Silver Spoon or Self-Made? Exploring 23 Years of Wealth Mobility
An analysis of the changes in wealth distribution as individuals age from their late 20s to early 50s reveals a substantial degree of persistence at the top 1%.