The seminar will be followed by drinks and canapes in the ASB lounge. Please send your RSVP for catering purposes to Amy Brushwood ( a.brushwood@unsw.edu.au ) by midday Monday, 7 November.
Abstract
Who becomes wealthy? Who stays wealthy? And who will always remain poor? This paper presents empirical estimates of dynamic household movements into and out of the top percents of the wealth distribution over individual household life cycles.
The opportunities to accumulate wealth create incentives for education, work effort, and entrepreneurship. We would expect considerable wealth mobility if these incentives are strong and affect behaviour. We calculate wealth mobility among the country's rich. The data are from an administrative Swedish source that retains wealth information from tax registers. The data are unique in that they follow a large sample of households over the period of almost 40 years, recording annual observations.
There is substantial movement into and out of this group when we follow individual households over long enough time spans. We find that wealth mobility increased until the end of the 1980s and then started to decrease.
Speaker
Henry Ohlsson, Uppsala University