New IFP Lectures with Wealth Inequality Analysis
2 Dec 2025
The Quantitative Economics with Python series has been expanded with significant new content on income fluctuation problems and wealth inequality.
New Lecture Content
- Transient Income Shocks: A new lecture separating transient shocks from the core IFP model, providing clearer theoretical exposition
- Wealth Inequality Analysis: New exercises analyzing how return volatility and labor income volatility affect wealth distribution
- Stochastic Returns: Improved simulation methods for studying wealth dynamics under uncertainty
Key Findings Highlighted
The new content demonstrates important economic insights:
- Varying return volatility (capital income risk) has a much larger impact on wealth inequality than labor income volatility
- The lectures include Gini coefficient calculations showing how different parameter choices affect wealth distribution
Technical Improvements
- Performance optimizations using
jax.lax.while_loopfor better JAX compatibility - Cleaner code structure with improved function signatures and better variable naming
- Enhanced visualizations of wealth dynamics and distribution
These updates reflect ongoing research collaboration and were developed with contributions from John Stachurski.
Published by: QuantEcon