« 'An Interview with Larry Summers' | Main | Fed Watch: Fed Yet To Fully Embrace A New Policy Path »

Thursday, February 11, 2016

'Does Inequality Cause Financial Distress?'

This is from a Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Working Paper:

Does inequality cause financial distress? Evidence from lottery winners and neighboring bankruptcies Sumit Agarwal, Vyacheslav Mikhed, and Barry Scholnick: Abstract We test the hypothesis that income inequality causes financial distress. To identify the effect of income inequality, we examine lottery prizes of random dollar magnitudes in the context of very small neighborhoods (13 households on average). We find that a C$1,000 increase in the lottery prize causes a 2.4% rise in subsequent bankruptcies among the winners’ close neighbors. We also provide evidence of conspicuous consumption as a mechanism for this causal relationship. The size of lottery prizes increases the value of visible assets (houses, cars, motorcycles), but not invisible assets (cash and pensions), appearing on the balance sheets of neighboring bankruptcy filers.
Download Full text.

    Posted by on Thursday, February 11, 2016 at 10:21 AM in Academic Papers, Economics, Income Distribution | Permalink  Comments (6)


    Comments

    Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.