Assessing Piketty’s second law of capitalism

Jakob Madsen (), Antonio Minniti and Francesco Venturini ()

Oxford Economic Papers, 2018, vol. 70, issue 1, 1-21

Abstract: This paper assesses Piketty’s second fundamental law of capitalism to investigate patterns and determinants of wealth inequality over the last century and a half. We first discuss the foundations of this theory on the basis of the most popular growth models, and then perform a long-run regression analysis of wealth inequality using Piketty and Zucman’s data and a new historical data set for the OECD countries covering the period since 1870 onwards. We find that the wealth-to-income ratio, β, is significantly related to the ratio between the saving rate, s, and the rate of income growth, g. The estimated coefficient for the s/g ratio ranges from 0.05 to 0.18, depending on the specification, while the theory predicts a unitary value. It is also shown that the wealth-to-income ratio responds to the variations in income growth much more than to variations in the saving rate.

JEL-codes: O10 O50 P10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpx040 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:oxecpp:v:70:y:2018:i:1:p:1-21.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Oxford Economic Papers is currently edited by James Forder and Francis J. Teal

More articles in Oxford Economic Papers from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().