IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecl/stabus/3948.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Financial and Total Wealth Inequality with Declining Interest Rates

Author

Listed:
  • Greenwald, Daniel L.

    (MIT Sloan)

  • Leombroni, Matteo

    (Stanford)

  • Lustig, Hanno

    (Stanford GSB and NBER)

  • Van Nieuwerburgh, Stijn

    (Columbia GSB and NBER)

Abstract

Financial wealth inequality and long-term real interest rates track each other closely over the post-war period. Faced with lower returns on financial wealth, households with high levels of financial wealth must increase savings to afford the consumption that they planned before the decline in rates. Lower rates beget higher financial wealth inequality. Inequality in total wealth, the sum of financial and human wealth and the relevant concept for household welfare, rises much less than financial wealth inequality and even declines at the top of the wealth distribution. A standard Bewley model produces the observed increase in financial wealth inequality in response to a decline in real interest rates, when high financial-wealth households have a financial portfolio with high duration.

Suggested Citation

  • Greenwald, Daniel L. & Leombroni, Matteo & Lustig, Hanno & Van Nieuwerburgh, Stijn, 2021. "Financial and Total Wealth Inequality with Declining Interest Rates," Research Papers 3948, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:3948
    DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3789220
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3789220
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.2139/ssrn.3789220?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Paul Beaudry & Césaire Meh, 2021. "Monetary Policy, Trends in Real Interest Rates and Depressed Demand," Staff Working Papers 21-27, Bank of Canada.
    2. Felici, Marco & Kenny, Geoff & Friz, Roberta, 2023. "Consumer savings behaviour at low and negative interest rates," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 157(C).
    3. Fisher, Jack & Gavazza, Alessandro & Liu, Lu & Ramadorai, Tarun & Tripathy, Jagdish, 2024. "Refinancing cross-subsidies in the mortgage market," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 158(C).
    4. Andersen, Torben M & Bhattacharya, Joydeep & Grodecka-Messi, Anna & Mann, Katja, 2022. "Pension reform and wealth inequality: evidence from Denmark," CEPR Discussion Papers 17078, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    5. Fernández-Villaverde, Jesús & Levintal, Oren, 2024. "The Distributional Effects of Asset Returns," CEPR Discussion Papers 18855, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    6. Andersen, Torben M. & Bhattacharya, Joydeep & Grodecka-Messi, Anna & Mann, Katja, 2024. "Pension reform and wealth inequality: Theory and evidence," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 165(C).
    7. Paz-Pardo, Gonzalo, 2022. "Younger generations and the lost dream of home ownership," Research Bulletin, European Central Bank, vol. 91.
    8. Arrigoni, Simone, 2024. "Who gets the flow? Financial globalisation and wealth inequality," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    9. Atif Mian & Ludwig Straub & Amir Sufi, 2021. "What explains the decline in r ∗ ? Rising income inequality versus demographic shifts," Working Papers 2021-12, Princeton University. Economics Department..

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • E25 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Aggregate Factor Income Distribution
    • E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:3948. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/gsstaus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.