We study how Americans respond to idiosyncratic and exogenous changes in household wealth and unearned income. Our analyses combine administrative data on U.S. lottery winners with an event study design. We first examine individual and household earnings responses to these windfall gains, finding significant and sizable wealth and income effects. On average, an extra dollar of unearned income in a given period reduces household labor earnings by about 50 cents, decreases total labor taxes by 10 cents, and increases consumption expenditure by 60 cents. These effects are heterogeneous across the income distribution, with households in higher quartiles of the income distribution reducing their earnings by a larger amount. Next, we examine margins of adjustment other than earnings and, in the course of doing so, address a number of important economic questions about how additional wealth or unearned income affect retirement decisions and labor market dynamics, family formation and dissolution, entrepreneurship and self-employment, and geographic mobility and neighborhood choice. Lastly, we carefully compare our findings to those reported in existing lottery studies. This comparison reveals that existing U.S. studies substantially underestimate wealth and income effects because they use measures that understate the earnings responses and overstate the after-tax wealth changes associated with lottery wins.

中文翻译：

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美国人如何应对家庭财富和非劳动收入的特殊和外生变化

我们研究美国人如何应对家庭财富和非劳动收入的特殊和外生变化。我们的分析将美国彩票中奖者的管理数据与事件研究设计相结合。我们首先研究个人和家庭收入对这些意外收益的反应，发现显着且相当大的财富和收入影响。平均而言，一定时期内额外增加一美元的非劳动收入会使家庭劳动收入减少约50美分，使劳动税总额减少10美分，并使消费支出增加60美分。这些影响在收入分布中是异质的，收入分布较高四分位的家庭收入减少幅度更大。接下来，我们研究收入以外的调整幅度，并在此过程中解决一些重要的经济问题，例如额外财富或非劳动收入如何影响退休决定和劳动力市场动态、家庭形成和解散、创业和自我保护。就业、地理流动性和社区选择。最后，我们仔细将我们的发现与现有彩票研究中报告的结果进行比较。这一比较表明，美国现有的研究大大低估了财富和收入的影响，因为它们使用的衡量标准低估了收入反应，夸大了与彩票中奖相关的税后财富变化。