The distributional implications of asymmetric income dynamics

Konstantinos Angelopoulos, Spyridon Lazarakis and Jim Malley

European Economic Review, 2020, vol. 128, issue C

Abstract: Income dynamics differ between groups of households defined by whether the head has university education or not and have changed asymmetrically in Great Britain since 2008. Using a heterogeneous agent incomplete markets model, we examine the quantitative implications of these differences for wealth inequality and for the distribution of conditional welfare losses. Within-group wealth inequality is higher for the non-university group and has increased since 2008 for both groups, while between-group inequality has also increased. Welfare losses are significantly higher for the non-university educated since 2008, and are driven by both a greater fall in mean income and a larger rise in income risk. Non-university educated households, which had initial wealth below the median and net labour income in the lower quintiles, suffered bigger losses. Social insurance policies beyond those currently in place can mitigate such welfare losses via tax and benefit redistributive mechanisms. For the broad majority of households, social insurance is valued more when it insures against the big adverse income shocks.

Keywords: Incomplete markets; Labour income processes; Conditional welfare; Insurance policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E21 E25 H23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292120301331
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:128:y:2020:i:c:s0014292120301331

DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2020.103502

Access Statistics for this article

European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer

More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().