IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/28613.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Financial and Total Wealth Inequality with Declining Interest Rates

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel L. Greenwald
  • Matteo Leombroni
  • Hanno Lustig
  • Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel L. Greenwald & Matteo Leombroni & Hanno Lustig & Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, 2021. "Financial and Total Wealth Inequality with Declining Interest Rates," NBER Working Papers 28613, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28613
    Note: AP CF EFG IFM PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w28613.pdf
    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. Andersen, Torben M. & Bhattacharya, Joydeep & Grodecka-Messi, Anna & Mann, Katja, 2022. "Pension reform and wealth inequality: evidence from Denmark," Working Paper Series 411, Sveriges Riksbank (Central Bank of Sweden).
    2. Felici, Marco & Kenny, Geoff & Friz, Roberta, 2023. "Consumer savings behaviour at low and negative interest rates," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 157(C).
    3. Fisher, Jack & Gavazza, Alessandro & Liu, Lu & Ramadorai, Tarun & Tripathy, Jagdish, 2021. "Refinancing cross-subsidies in the mortgage market," Bank of England working papers 948, Bank of England.
    4. Atif Mian & Ludwig Straub & Amir Sufi, 2021. "What explains the decline in r ∗ ? Rising income inequality versus demographic shifts," Working Papers 2021-12, Princeton University. Economics Department..
    5. Paul Beaudry & Césaire Meh, 2021. "Monetary Policy, Trends in Real Interest Rates and Depressed Demand," Staff Working Papers 21-27, Bank of Canada.
    6. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde & Oren Levintal, 2024. "The Distributional Effects of Asset Returns," NBER Working Papers 32182, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Paz-Pardo, Gonzalo, 2022. "Younger generations and the lost dream of home ownership," Research Bulletin, European Central Bank, vol. 91.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E01 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General - - - Measurement and Data on National Income and Product Accounts and Wealth; Environmental Accounts
    • E1 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General Aggregative Models
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • E25 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Aggregate Factor Income Distribution
    • E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G5 - Financial Economics - - Household Finance

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:nbr:nberwo:28613. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    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.