Wealth inequality: Opportunity or unfairness?

Michael Haliassos, Thomas Jansson and Yigitcan Karabulut

No 161, IMFS Working Paper Series from Goethe University Frankfurt, Institute for Monetary and Financial Stability (IMFS)

Abstract: The authors present evidence of a new propagation mechanism for wealth inequality, based on differential responses, by education, to greater inequality at the start of economic life. The paper is motivated by a novel positive cross-country relationship between wealth inequality and perceptions of opportunity and fairness, which holds only for the more educated. Using unique administrative micro data and a quasi-field experiment of exogenous allocation of households, the authors find that exposure to a greater top 10% wealth share at the start of economic life in the country leads only the more educated placed in locations with above-median wealth mobility to attain higher wealth levels and position in the cohort-specific wealth distribution later on. Underlying this effect is greater participation in risky financial and real assets and in self-employment, with no evidence for a labor income, unemployment risk, or human capital investment channel. This differential response is robust to controlling for initial exposure to fixed or other time-varying local features, including income inequality, and consistent with self-fulfilling responses of the more educated to perceived opportunities, without evidence of imitation or learning from those at the top.

Keywords: Household finance; wealth inequality; propagation of inequality; education; opportunity; refugees (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 D31 E21 E44 G5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
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https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/235134/1/1760732451.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Wealth Inequality: Opportunity or Unfairness? (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:imfswp:161

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