About the Speaker:

Dr Zhou holds a PhD in economics from the University of Western Ontario, where he also served as Teaching Fellow. He has worked in China’s financial industry for several years. His research interests are in asset location, life-cycle portfolio choice, pension plans and retirement savings, monetary policy and asset holding, macroeconomic theory, and computation economics. His current research topics include the role of private pensions in accounting for the distribution of retirement wealth across U.S. households, and stock market participation rates in taxable and tax-deferred accounts.

Abstract:

A satisfactory theory of wealth inequality should account not only for the marginal distribution of wealth, but also for the joint distribution of wealth and earnings. Recent work argues that standard life-cycle model fails to account for three key features of the data: (1) the correlation between lifetime earnings and retirement wealth; (2) the wealth gaps between earnings rich and earnings poor households; and (3) wealth inequality among households with similar lifetime earnings. This paper investigates the role of private pensions for retirement wealth distribution. We find that the predictions of a model with private pensions are closer to the data. In particular, private pensions substantially improve the model’s ability to account for the large non-pension wealth inequality observed among households with similar lifetime earnings.

Reservation:

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