Financial and Total Wealth Inequality with Declining Interest Rates /
Greenwald, Daniel L.
Financial and Total Wealth Inequality with Declining Interest Rates / Daniel L. Greenwald, Matteo Leombroni, Hanno Lustig, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh. - Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2021. - 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white); - NBER working paper series no. w28613 . - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w28613. .
March 2021.
Financial wealth inequality and long-term real interest rates track each other closely over the post-war period. Faced with unanticipated lower real rates, households which rely more on financial wealth must see large capital gains to afford the consumption that they planned before the decline in rates. Lower rates beget higher financial wealth inequality. Inequality in total wealth, the sum of financial and human wealth and the relevant concept for house-hold welfare, rises much less than financial wealth inequality and even declines at the top of the wealth distribution. A standard incomplete markets model reproduces the observed in-crease in financial wealth inequality in response to a decline in real interest rates because high financial-wealth households have a financial portfolio with high duration.
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Mode of access: World Wide Web.
Financial and Total Wealth Inequality with Declining Interest Rates / Daniel L. Greenwald, Matteo Leombroni, Hanno Lustig, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh. - Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2021. - 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white); - NBER working paper series no. w28613 . - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w28613. .
March 2021.
Financial wealth inequality and long-term real interest rates track each other closely over the post-war period. Faced with unanticipated lower real rates, households which rely more on financial wealth must see large capital gains to afford the consumption that they planned before the decline in rates. Lower rates beget higher financial wealth inequality. Inequality in total wealth, the sum of financial and human wealth and the relevant concept for house-hold welfare, rises much less than financial wealth inequality and even declines at the top of the wealth distribution. A standard incomplete markets model reproduces the observed in-crease in financial wealth inequality in response to a decline in real interest rates because high financial-wealth households have a financial portfolio with high duration.
System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.