科学研究

Dr. Wei Cui is an associate professor at University College London. His research interests are in the joint area of macroeconomics and finance, with a particular emphasis on the interaction of fiscal and monetary policies. Some of his research papers were published in Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of the European Economic Association, American Economic Review (Papers and Procedings), and many others.

Compared to the distributions of earnings, the distributions of wealth in the US and many other countries are strikingly concentrated on the top and skewed to the right. To explain the income and wealth inequality, we provide a tractable heterogeneous-agent model with incomplete markets in continuous time. We separate illiquid capital assets from liquid bond assets and introduce capital return jump risks, which are crucial for generating a thicker tail of the wealth distribution than that of the labor income distribution. Under recursive utility, we derive optimal consumption and wealth in closed form and show that the stationary wealth distribution has an exponential right tail that closely approximates a power-law distribution. Our calibrated model can match the income and wealth distributions in the US data including the extreme right tail of the wealth distribution. We also show that the impacts of taxing the capital jump returns on the aggregate and on the distribution of wealth depend crucially on how tax revenues are spent.