Does inequality cause financial distress? Evidence from lottery winners and neighboring bankruptcies

Sumit Agarwal, Vyacheslav Mikhed and Barry Scholnick

No 16-4, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Abstract: Revised Oct 2016. We test the hypothesis that income inequality causes financial distress. To identify the effect of income inequality, we examine lottery prizes of random dollar magnitudes in the context of very small neighborhoods (13 households on average). We find that a C$1,000 increase in the lottery prize causes a 2.4% rise in subsequent bankruptcies among the winners? close neighbors. We also provide evidence of conspicuous consumption as a mechanism for this causal relationship. The size of lottery prizes increases the value of visible assets (houses, cars, motorcycles), but not invisible assets (cash and pensions), appearing on the balance sheets of neighboring bankruptcy filers.

Keywords: Income inequality; Bankruptcy; Conspicuous consumption; Lottery; Financial distress (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 D31 K35 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2016-02-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sea
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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