The emergence of the asset economy in advanced capitalist countries has enabled significant accumulation by high‐wealth individuals, and rise finance provided new, profitable investment vehicles for those with investable capital. This process been described as a form compensatory logic to achieve protection from future risks, especially current neoliberal environment governments reducing state ...

This paper examines whether historical wealth distributions can affect long run output and distribution despite rational saving behavior and the absence of any technological nonconvexities or externalities. We consider a model of equilibrium short period financial contracts, where poor agents face credit constraints owing to moral hazard and limited liability, and principals and agents are rand...

In this paper, we examine the role played by differential mortality in estimates of life cycle wealth profiles. Our study makes three contributions. First, we show that the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) provides reliable data on mortality as compared to the US life table data. Second, we provide estimates of the relationship between mortality and wealth and show strong evide...

We propose a rich model of household behavior to study the effect two important policies: mortgage interest tax deduction and mandatory amortization. These policies have attracted some controversy, first because they are conceived increase overall saving, an objective that literature does not agree can achieve, second incentivize illiquid savings may thus share ‘wealthy hand-to-mouth’ household...