Inequality and Welfare in a Low Rate Environment

摘要过去40年的特点是利率长期下降，而资产估值相对上升。该提案由两个项目组成，它们考察了利率下降对分配的影响。第一个项目探讨利率下降对财富不平等的影响。第二篇研究了利率下降对福利的影响，重点关注了谁从这一趋势中受益，谁又从这一趋势中损失。该项目进一步收集高财富收入的详细数据，以及从财务文件和调查中收集的资产购买的细粒度数据。该项目在理解货币政策对财富不平等和个人福利的作用方面具有政策意义。第一个项目开发了一种充分的统计方法，以确定较低税率对最高财富不平等的长期影响，通过财富分配的帕累托指数来衡量。通过将财富调查、财务文件、股票和公司层面的财务数据结合起来，创建了一个关于美国亿万富翁所拥有的公司融资的新数据集，估计了足够的统计数据。第二个项目将检验较低利率或较高资产估值对个人福利的影响。使用标准的消费-储蓄模型，该项目将得出充分的统计数据，以捕捉较低的福利费率对终生的影响。然后，该项目将通过使用整个财富分配中净资产购买的微观数据来量化这些统计数据。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

AbstractThe past forty years have been characterized by a secular decline in interest rates and, relatedly, an increase in asset valuations. This proposal consists of two projects that examine the distributional effects of declining interest rates. The first project explores the effect of declining interest rates on wealth inequality. The second examines the welfare implications of declining interest rates by focusing on who gains and who loses from this trend. The project further collects detailed data on high wealth income, and granular data on asset purchases from financial filings and surveys. The project has policy implications in understanding the role of monetary policy on wealth inequality and individual welfare. The first project develops a sufficient statistic approach to determine the long-run effect of lower rates on top wealth inequality, as measured by the Pareto exponent of the wealth distribution. Sufficient statistic is estimated by creating a new dataset on the financing of firms owned by billionaires in the US, by combining surveys of fortunes, financial filings, and stock and firm level financial data. The second project will examine the effect of lower rates, or alternatively higher asset valuations, on individual welfare. Using a standard consumption-saving model, the project will derive a sufficient statistic that captures the lifetime effect of lower rates on welfare. The project will then quantify these statistics by using micro-data on net asset purchases across the whole wealth distribution.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.