IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/17237.html

Wealth Inequality: Opportunity for Me or for Others?

Author

Listed:
  • Haliassos, Michael
  • Jansson, Thomas
  • Karabulut, Yigitcan

Abstract

Early exposure to local wealth inequality and salient wealth transitions propagates both. Unique administrative data and a quasi-field experiment with exogenous assignment show that this exposure leads better-educated, but not less-educated, households to take financial, real-asset, and self-employment risks and move up the wealth distribution. We find little evidence for responses involving better-paying, more secure jobs, or human capital accumulation. Our findings point away from supply-side factors favoring wealth accumulation by the better-educated, and instrumental variable tests using asset-return-driven shocks to local wealth inequality strengthen this interpretation. Neighborhood-level analyses suggest local exposure and social transmission are the operative propagation mechanism.

Suggested Citation

  • Haliassos, Michael & Jansson, Thomas & Karabulut, Yigitcan, 2022. "Wealth Inequality: Opportunity for Me or for Others?," CEPR Discussion Papers 17237, Centre for Economic Policy Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17237
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP17237
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • G5 - Financial Economics - - Household Finance
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • D1 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior

    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:cpr:ceprdp:17237. 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: CEPR (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cepr.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.