Articles - Journaltalk

Benhabib, Bisin, and Zhu, "The Distribution of Wealth and Fiscal Policy in Economies with Finitely Lived Agents" (2011, Econometrica), and an earlier 2006 unpublished manuscript by Benhabib and Bisin, study continuous-time overlapping generations (OLG) models with bequest and show that the stationary wealth distribution admits a Pareto tail. The 2011 article became influential once wealth inequality turned fashionable in the 2010s. In this comment, I document that an earlier paper by Dutta and Michel, "The Distribution of Wealth with Imperfect Altruism" (1998, Journal of Economic Theory), had already studied a remarkably similar discrete-time OLG model with bequest and obtained a Pareto-tailed wealth distribution. How does an essential preceding article of 1998 go unrecognized by the authors of the 2006 and 2011 papers? And, how is it that the 1998 article is neglected while the 2011 article is cited more than ten times as often?