Human wealth evolution: Trends and fluctuations

Wealth in Human Evolution and Human History

This chapter presents a theory of brain and life span evolution and applies it to both primates in general, and to the hominid line, in particular. To address the simultaneous effects of natural selection on the brain and on the life span, it extends the standard life history theory in biology which organizes research into the evolutionary forces shaping age-schedules of fertility and mortality...

Wealth distribution and output fluctuations

We explore the link between wealth inequality and output fluctuations in a general two-sector neoclassical growth model with endogenous labor and heterogeneous agents. When agents have homogeneous CRRA preferences and individual wealth is Pareto distributed a sufficiently large rise in the Gini index typically leads to an increase in endogenous fluctuations of output. For general economies, we ...

Patterns and Trends in Sovereign Wealth Fund Investments: A Post-Crisis Descriptive Analysis

A nalyzing more than 9,400 investment transactions performed by 32 sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), from 23 countries, and targeted towards 77 countries, between 2010 and 2013, this study highlights some of the most important visible patterns and nuances in SWF investments. First, lion’s share of SWF investments are cross-border transactions that originated from and targeted towards hi...

Long-'term Trends in American Wealth Inequality

Seventeenth and eighteenth century America saw relatively egalitarian and stable aggregate wealth concentration. During the first half of the nineteenth century, in contrast, there was a marked rise in wealth concentration. The period from the Civil War to the Great Depression was also one of stability in wealth concentration, but it was characterized by substantially greater inequality than ha...

Recent trends in wealth ownership : 1983 - 1998