Ricerc@Sapienza

The evaluation of the distribution of wealth across members of a society and its determinants has recently gained increasing attention among scientists and policymakers. This project will contribute to make further advancements in this field combining the economics of inequality and the economics of pension literature.
The first part of the project aims at studying, in a comparative way and across time, the role of private and public pensions on the distribution of household wealth in European countries. Differently from previous contributions that only include marketable wealth in the definition of household wealth, we will measure and include in this definition the expected income from pensions, which has been neglected so far. In addition to adopt an inequality of outcome perspective, as is usually done in all existing contributions, we will extend our analysis adopting an inequality of opportunity perspective. The second part of the project aims at showing to what extent public and private pensions reduce or reinforce wealth inequality. For policy discussion, the equalizing power of pension will be compared with standard measures of pension financial sustainability and generosity. The third part of the project aims at understanding the determinants of augmented wealth inequality. We will revise standard causality analyses, including the effect of health condition, education, and financial literacy on wealth inequality, using our new definition of wealth. Moreover, we will study the role played by financial development and the informatization of the financial system on the distribution of augmented wealth.