Quantitative Economics

Journal Of The Econometric Society

Edited by: Stéphane Bonhomme • Print ISSN: 1759-7323 • Online ISSN: 1759-7331

Quantitative Economics: Nov, 2024, Volume 15, Issue 4

Capital Income Jumps and Wealth Distribution

https://doi.org/10.3982/QE2096
p. 1197-1247

Jess Benhabib|Wei Cui|Jianjun Miao

Compared to the distributions of earnings, the distributions of wealth in the US and many other countries are strikingly concentrated on the top and skewed to the right. To explain the income and wealth inequality, we provide a tractable heterogeneous‐agent model with incomplete markets in continuous time. We separate illiquid capital assets from liquid bond assets and introduce jump risks to capital income, which are crucial for generating a thicker tail of the wealth distribution than that of the labor income distribution. Under recursive utility, we derive optimal consumption and wealth in closed form and show that the stationary wealth distribution has an exponential right tail that closely approximates a power‐law distribution. Our calibrated model can match the income and wealth distributions in the US data including the extreme right tail of the wealth distribution.


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Supplemental Material

Supplement to "Capital Income Jumps and Wealth Distribution"

Jess Benhabib, Wei Cui, and Jianjun Miao

The replication package for this paper is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11510714. The Journal checked the data and codes included in the package for their ability to reproduce the results in the paper and approved online appendices.

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