Distribution of Wealth and Incomplete Markets: Theory and Empirical Evidence

Davide Fiaschi and Matteo Marsili

Discussion Papers from Dipartimento di Economia e Management (DEM), University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

Abstract: This paper analyzes the equilibrium distribution of wealth in an economy where firms' productivities are subject to idiosyncratic shocks, returns on factors are determined in competitive markets, dynasties have linear consumption functions and government imposes taxes on capital and labour incomes and equally redistributes the collected resources to dynasties. The equilibrium distribution of wealth is explicitly calculated and its shape crucially depends on market incompleteness. With incomplete markets it follows a Paretian law in the top tail and the Pareto exponent depends on the saving rate, on the net return on capital, on the growth rate of population and on portfolio diversification. On the contrary, the characteristics of the labour market mostly a effects the bottom tail of the distribution of wealth. The analysis also suggests a positive relationship between growth and wealth inequality. The theoretical predictions find a corroboration in the empirical evidence of Italy and United States in the period 1987-2004.

Keywords: wealth distribution; incomplete markets; earnings distribution; capital income taxation; productivity shocks; portfolio diversification; nonparametric estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 D31 D33 N30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-04-20
Note: ISSN 2039-1854
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ec.unipi.it/documents/Ricerca/papers/2009-83.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Distribution of wealth and incomplete markets: Theory and empirical evidence (2012)
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:pie:dsedps:2009/83

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Dipartimento di Economia e Management (DEM), University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().