Using a wide variety of business cycle dating and filtering techniques, this paper documents the cyclical behavior of the post-tax income distribution in the US. First, all incomes are cyclical and co-move with the business cycle. Second, lower and higher income individuals experience significantly larger fluctuations across the business cycle than middle-income individuals. Third, these fluctuations ...
We present evidence from a repeated survey on risky asset holdings carried out on a representative sample of the German population six times between April and June 2020. Given the size of the Covid-19 shock, we find little evidence of portfolio rebalancing in April 2020. In May, however, individual investors started buying heavily, fueling market recovery. The cross-section shows large differences ...
We present first evidence how individual risk preferences shape entrepreneurial investment among the very wealthy using novel survey data from the top of the wealth distribution, which have been added to the 2019 German Socio-economic Panel Study. The data include private wealth balance sheets, in particular the value of own private business assets, and a standard measure of risk tolerance. We find that ...
