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Three Essays on Wealth Inequality

Miao, Xing
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1595509313925063

Abstract Details

2020, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Economics.
Wealth inequality has always been part of American life, but not until recently has it risen to a level not seen since the Great Depression. In this dissertation, I present three essays in which the wealth gap issue is investigated in depth from three different perspectives. The first essay deals with entrepreneurs, a group of people significantly more affluent than the rest of the population. Inspired by vastly different results from Hurst and Lusardi [2004] and Fairlie and Krashinsky [2012], I examine how liquidity constraints affect business entry using a new dataset. My essay not only resolves the conflict between these two studies, but most of all, delivers a unified message about the topic. In the second essay, I incorporate a non-parametric estimate of earnings into a two-asset model to explore how much wealth owned by the richest 1% and 5% of the households can be accounted for. By relaxing the normality assumption imposed on earning shocks, my model can better fit the upper tail of the wealth distribution and generate fewer households with negative or zero wealth. The third essay explores two other wealth-generating channels: differential returns and intergenerational link in returns on assets. By building them into an overlapping generations framework, my model can almost perfectly match the wealth of the top 5% of the households and well replicate the wealth of the top percentile.
Pok-sang Lam (Advisor)
Hijame Miyazaki (Committee Member)
Lucia Dunn (Committee Member)
146 p.
Economics
wealth inequality; differential returns; wealth gap; intergenerational; unemployed; unemployment; entrepreneur; liquidity constraints; business entry; wealth; return on assets

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Miao, X. (2020). Three Essays on Wealth Inequality [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1595509313925063

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Miao, Xing. Three Essays on Wealth Inequality. 2020. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1595509313925063.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Miao, Xing. "Three Essays on Wealth Inequality." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1595509313925063

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1595509313925063
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.