We use population data on capital income and wealth holdings for Norway to measure asset positions and wealth returns before individuals marry and after the household is formed. These data allow us to establish a number of novel facts. First, individuals sort on personal wealth rather than parental wealth. Second, people match also on their personal returns to wealth and assortative mating on returns is as strong as that on wealth. Third, post-marriage returns on family wealth reflect in equal part the pre-marriage returns of the two spouses. However, for households at the top of the wealth distribution at marriage, family wealth is largely managed by the spouse with the highest potential to grow it, providing a microfoundation for the scale dependence in wealth returns documented in several empirical papers. Fourth, marriage lowers the degree of wealth inequality as well as the heterogeneity in returns relative to the counterfactual case of no marriages. We use a simple framework to illustrate how the inequality-attenuating role of marriage is affected by assortative mating on wealth and returns and by wealth management task allocation between spouses.

Assessing the importance of uninsurable wage risk for individual financial choices faces two challenges. First, the identification of the marginal effect requires a measure of at least one component of risk that cannot be diversified or avoided. Moreover, measures of uninsurable wage risk must vary over time to eliminate unobserved heterogeneity. Second, evaluating the economic significance of risk requires knowledge of the size of all the wage risk actually faced. Existing estimates are problematic because measures of wage risk fail to satisfy the "non-avoidability" requirement. This creates a downward bias which is at the root of the small estimated effect of wage risk on portfolio choices. To tackle this problem we match panel data of workers and firms and use the variability in the profitability of the firm that is passed over to workers to obtain a measure of uninsurable risk. Using this measure to instrument total variability in individual earnings, we find that the marginal effect of uninsurable wage risk is much larger than estimates that ignore endogeneity. We bound the economic impact of risk and find that its overall effect is contained, not because its marginal effect is small but because its size is small. And the size of uninsurable wage risk is small because firms provide substantial wage insurance.

We propose a new approach to identify the strength of the precautionary motive and the extent of self-insurance in response to earnings risk based on Euler equation estimates. To address endogeneity problems, we use Norwegian administrative data and instrument consumption and earnings volatility with the variance of firm-specific shocks. The instrument is valid because firms pass some of their productivity shocks onto wages; moreover, for most workers, firm shocks are hard to avoid. Our estimates suggest a coefficient of relative prudence of 2, in a very plausible range.

We provide a systematic analysis of the properties of individual returns to wealth using 12 years of population data from Norway's administrative tax records. We document a number of novel results. First, individuals earn markedly different average returns on their net worth (a standard deviation of 22.1%) and on its components. Second, heterogeneity in returns does not arise merely from differences in the allocation of wealth between safe and risky assets: returns are heterogeneous even within narrow asset classes. Third, returns are positively correlated with wealth: moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile of the net worth distribution increases the return by 18 percentage points (and 10 percentage points if looking at net‐of‐tax returns). Fourth, individual wealth returns exhibit substantial persistence over time. We argue that while this persistence partly arises from stable differences in risk exposure and assets scale, it also reflects heterogeneity in sophistication and financial information, as well as entrepreneurial talent. Finally, wealth returns are correlated across generations. We discuss the implications of these findings for several strands of the wealth inequality debate.

Lacking a long time series on the assets of the very wealthy, Saez and Zucman (2015) use US tax records to obtain estimates of wealth holdings by capitalizing asset income from tax returns. They document marked upward trends in wealth concentration. We use data on tax returns and actual wealth holdings from tax records for the whole Norwegian population to test the robustness of the methodology. We document that measures of wealth based on the capitalization approach can lead to misleading conclusions about the level and the dynamics of wealth inequality if returns are heterogeneous and even moderately correlated with wealth.

Using error‐free data on life‐cycle portfolio allocations of a large sample of Norwegian households, we document a double adjustment as households age: a rebalancing of the portfolio composition away from stocks as they approach retirement and stock market exit after retirement. When structurally estimating an extended life‐cycle model, the parameter combination that best fits the data is one with a relatively large risk aversion, a small per‐period participation cost, and a yearly probability of a large stock market loss in line with the frequency of stock market crashes in Norway.

We show that family background matters significantly for children’s accumulation of wealth and investor behavior as adults, even when removing the genetic connection between children and the parents raising them. The analysis is made possible by linking Korean-born children who were adopted at infancy by Norwegian parents to a population panel data set with detailed information on wealth and socioeconomic characteristics. The mechanism by which these Korean-Norwegian adoptees were assigned to adoptive families is known and effectively random. This mechanism allows us to estimate the causal effects from an adoptee being raised in one type of family versus another.

Over the last several decades, there has been a large increase in asset valuations across many asset classes. These rising valuations had important effects on the distribution of wealth. However, little is known regarding their effect on the distribution of welfare. To make progress on this question, we derive a sufficient statistic for the (money metric) welfare effect of a change in asset valuations, which depends on the present value of an individual’s net asset sales: rising asset prices benefit prospective sellers and harm prospective buyers. We estimate this quantity using panel microdata covering the universe of financial transactions in Norway from 1994 to 2019. We find that rising asset valuations had large redistributive effects: they redistributed from the young towards the old and from the poor towards the wealthy