IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/1905.13045.html

The Income Fluctuation Problem and the Evolution of Wealth

Author

Listed:
  • Qingyin Ma
  • John Stachurski
  • Alexis Akira Toda

Abstract

We analyze the household savings problem in a general setting where returns on assets, non-financial income and impatience are all state dependent and fluctuate over time. All three processes can be serially correlated and mutually dependent. Rewards can be bounded or unbounded and wealth can be arbitrarily large. Extending classic results from an earlier literature, we determine conditions under which (a) solutions exist, are unique and are globally computable, (b) the resulting wealth dynamics are stationary, ergodic and geometrically mixing, and (c) the wealth distribution has a Pareto tail. We show how these results can be used to extend recent studies of the wealth distribution. Our conditions have natural economic interpretations in terms of asymptotic growth rates for discounting and return on savings.

Suggested Citation

  • Qingyin Ma & John Stachurski & Alexis Akira Toda, 2019. "The Income Fluctuation Problem and the Evolution of Wealth," Papers 1905.13045, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2020.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1905.13045
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.13045
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Thomas J. Sargent & John Stachurski, 2024. "Dynamic Programming: Finite States," Papers 2401.10473, arXiv.org.
    2. Sorge Marco M., 2024. "To Bequeath, or Not to Bequeath? On Labour Income Risk and Top Wealth Concentration," The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 24(2), pages 759-779.
    3. Guerra Vallejos, Ernesto & Bobenrieth Hochfarber, Eugenio & Bobenrieth Hochfarber, Juan & Wright, Brian D., 2021. "Solving dynamic stochastic models with multiple occasionally binding constraints," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 105(C).
    4. Beare, Brendan K & Toda, Alexis Akira, 2020. "On the emergence of a power law in the distribution of COVID-19 cases," University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series qt9k5027d0, Department of Economics, UC San Diego.
    5. Ma, Qingyin & Stachurski, John & Toda, Alexis Akira, 2022. "Unbounded dynamic programming via the Q-transform," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 100(C).
    6. Brendan K. Beare & Alexis Akira Toda, 2022. "Determination of Pareto Exponents in Economic Models Driven by Markov Multiplicative Processes," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 90(4), pages 1811-1833, July.
    7. Liu, Haoyu & Li, Lun, 2023. "On the concavity of consumption function under habit formation," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 106(C).
    8. Ji Hyung Lee & Yuya Sasaki & Alexis Akira Toda & Yulong Wang, 2021. "Fixed-k Tail Regression: New Evidence on Tax and Wealth Inequality from Forbes 400," Papers 2105.10007, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2022.
    9. Jordan Roulleau-Pasdeloup, 2025. "Explicit Consumption Functions with Borrowing Constraints: a Continuous Time Approach," Papers 2511.03452, arXiv.org.
    10. Selahattin Imrohoroglu, 2023. "Mpk," CIGS Working Paper Series 24-002E, The Canon Institute for Global Studies.
    11. Ma, Qingyin & Toda, Alexis Akira, 2022. "Asymptotic linearity of consumption functions and computational efficiency," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 98(C).
    12. Gouel, Christophe & Ma, Qingyin & Stachurski, John, 2024. "Interest rate dynamics and commodity prices," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 222(C).
    13. Toda, Alexis Akira & Walsh, Kieran James, 2024. "Recent advances on uniqueness of competitive equilibrium," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 113(C).
    14. Tjeerd de Vries & Alexis Akira Toda, 2022. "Capital and Labor Income Pareto Exponents Across Time and Space," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 68(4), pages 1058-1078, December.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C61 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods; Programming Models; Mathematical and Simulation Modeling - - - Optimization Techniques; Programming Models; Dynamic Analysis
    • C62 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods; Programming Models; Mathematical and Simulation Modeling - - - Existence and Stability Conditions of Equilibrium
    • C63 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods; Programming Models; Mathematical and Simulation Modeling - - - Computational Techniques
    • D14 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Saving; Personal Finance
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1905.13045. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.