A striking feature of U.S. data on income and consumption is that inequality increases with age. This paper asks if individual-specific earnings risk can provide a coherent explanation. We find that it can. We construct an overlapping generations general equilibrium model in which households face uninsurable earnings shocks over the course of their lifetimes. Earnings inequality is exogenous and is calibrated to match data from the U.S. Panel Study on Income Dynamics. Consumption inequality is endogenous and matches well data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey. The total risk households face is decomposed into that realized before entering the labor market and that realized throughout the working years. In welfare terms, the latter is found to be more important than the former.

This paper attempts to be a first step in the construction of a reliable quantitative theory of the income distribution business cycle dynamics.

I undertake a quantitative investigation into the short run effects of changes in the timing of taxes for model economies in which heterogeneous households face a borrowing constraint. A combination of the distortionary effects of non-lump-sum taxation and the liquidity effects arising from the asset market structure are found to imply large real effects from tax changes. For example, a temporary proportional income tax increase in the benchmark model economy reduces aggregate consumption by around 29 cents for every additional dollar of tax revenue raised. The consumption of low wealth households who are close to the borrowing constraint is most sensitive to the current tax rate. While there are many such households, richer households account for a disproportionately large fraction of aggregate income and consumption. Thus the distortionary effects of proportional taxation are quantitatively more important at the aggregate level than the effects associated with incompleteness of asset markets.

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We study the role of habit formation in shaping the amount of precautionary savings and the wealth distribution in heterogeneous agents model economies with idiosyncratic uncertainty. We adjust preferences to equate the Intertemporal Elasticity of Substitution in all model economies. We find that habit formation brings a hefty increase in precautionary savings and very mild reductions in the coefficient of variation and in the Gini index of wealth. These findings hold for both persistent and non persistent habits, with the effects of the former being much larger.

views expressed in this paper are those of the authors, and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Board or its staff. 1

This article uses data from the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances and from recent waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to update a study of economic inequality in the United States based on 1992 and earlier data. The article reports data on the U.S. distributions of earnings, income, and wealth and on related features of inequality, such as age, employment status, educational attainment, and marital status. It also reports data on the economic inequality among U.S. households in financial trouble and on the economic mobility of U.S. households. The article finds that earnings, income, and wealth were very unequally distributed among U.S. households late in the 1990s, just as they had been at the beginning of the decade. It concludes that the basic facts about economic inequality in the United States did not change much during the 1990s.

This article is largely a description of inequality of earnings, income, and wealth in the United States in 2007 as measured by the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). We look at inequality in relation to various characteristics such as age, education, employment status, marital status, and whether households are late payers or include bankruptcy filers. We also look at economic mobility. We compare these variables in 2007 with their values in our earlier study in 1998. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System. FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF MINNEAPOLIS

The aim of this paper is to explain the wealth distribution in the US economy, in particular the high concentration of wealth at the very top end of the distribution. In the literature it was conjectured that rich households accumulate more wealth (given their income) than what can be explained by standard consumption/saving models. To address this issue, I develop a general equilibrium heterogenous agent model and confront it with data about the top income and wealth distribution. It turns out that an off-the-shelf model fails to explain some important characteristics of the data. Standard forms of altruistic bequest motives do not help either. However, I identify two elements that help to bring the model in line with the data. First, modelling the idiosyncratic return risk that rich household face from closely held businesses. Second, modelling a capitalist spirit motive, where capital provides utility services directly, not just through consumption, as was proposed by Carroll (1998). Address of the author: