TY  - JOUR
AU  - Benhabib,Jess
AU  - Zhu,Shenghao
TI  - Age, Luck, and Inheritance
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14128
PY  - 2008
Y2  - June 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14128
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14128.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jess Benhabib
Department of Economics
New York University
19 West 4th Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10012
Tel: 212/998-8971
Fax: 212/995-4186
E-Mail: jess.benhabib@nyu.edu

Shenghao Zhu
Department of Economics
NYU
19 West 4th Street, 6th Floor
New York NY 10012
E-Mail: sz436@nyu.edu
AB  - We present a mechanism to analytically generate a double Pareto distribution of wealth in a continuous time OLG model with optimizing agents who have bequest motives, are subject to stochastic returns on capital and have uncertain lifespans. We disentangle, roughly, the contribution of inheritance, age and stochastic rates of capital return to wealth inequality, in particular to the Gini coefficient. We investigate the role of the fiscal and redistributive policies for wealth inequality and social welfare.
ER  -