Bitte verwenden Sie diesen Link, um diese Publikation zu zitieren, oder auf sie als Internetquelle zu verweisen: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/251015 
Autor:innen: 
Erscheinungsjahr: 
2022
Schriftenreihe/Nr.: 
Working Paper No. WP 2022-05
Verlag: 
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Zusammenfassung: 
Wealth is distributed more unevenly than income, and one contributing factor might be that richer households earn higher portfolio returns. I uncover one channel that causes portfolio returns to be increasing in wealth: Poorer households consistently buy risky assets in booms-when expected returns are low-and sell after a bust-when expected returns are high. Although time-varying expected returns are a robust empirical fact, theories are ambiguous on whether poorer or richer households engage in such cyclical trading patterns. I estimate the trading patterns for households across wealth levels, in the US housing market for 1988-2013. I interact housing ownership patterns from deeds records with household-level wealth, which I infer from merging owners' surnames with their name-based income in the 1940 full Census. The estimated dispersion in expected returns from this "buy-high-sell-low" channel is large: The interquartile-range difference is 60 basis points per year. The channel predicts that geographies with historically higher volatility will feature more wealth inequality than income inequality: I verify this implication in the data. These results suggest that a government policy intended to boost poorer households' wealth via homeownership can backfire if it ignores the status of house prices.
Schlagwörter: 
Wealth inequality
business cycles
real estate asset
timing of transaction
wealth return
JEL: 
D15
D31
E32
G11
R21
Persistent Identifier der Erstveröffentlichung: 
Dokumentart: 
Working Paper

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