Bequests and heterogeneity in retirement wealth

Households hold vastly heterogeneous amounts of wealth when they reach retirement, and differences in lifetime earnings explain only part of this variation. This paper studies the role of intergenerational transmission of ability, voluntary bequest motives, and the recipiency of accidental and intended bequests (both in terms of timing and size) in generating wealth dispersion at retirement, in the context of a rich quantitative model. Modeling voluntary bequests, and realistically calibrating them, not only generates more wealth dispersion at retirement and reduces the correlation between retirement wealth and lifetime income, but also generates a skewed bequest distribution that is close to the one in the observed data

Nature of Quasielectrons and the Continuum of Neutral Bulk Excitations in the Laughlin Quantum Hall Fluids

We construct model wavefunctions for a family of single-quasielectron states supported by the $\nu=1/3$ fractional quantum Hall (FQH) fluid. The charge $e^*$ = $e/3$ quasielectron state is identified as a composite of a charge-$2e^*$ quasiparticle and a $-e^*$ quasihole, orbiting around their common center of charge with relative angular momentum $n\hbar > 0$, and corresponds precisely to the "composite fermion" construction based on a filled $n=0$ Landau level plus an extra particle in level $n > 0$. An effective three-body model (one $2e^*$ quasiparticle and two $-e^*$ quasiholes) is introduced to capture the essential physics of the neutral bulk excitations.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figs, minor modifications for the published versio

Dynamics of particle-particle collisions in a viscous liquid

When two solid spheres collide in a liquid, the dynamic collision process is slowed by viscous dissipation and the increased pressure in the interparticle gap as compared with dry collisions. This paper investigates liquid-immersed head-on and oblique collisions, which complements previously investigated particle-on-wall immersed collisions. By defining the normal from the line of centers at contact, the experimental findings support the decomposition of an oblique collision into its normal and tangential components of motion. The normal relative particle motion is characterized by an effective coefficient of restitution and a binary Stokes number with a correlation that follows the particle-wall results. The tangential motion is described by a collision model using a normal coefficient of restitution and a friction coefficient that are modified for the liquid effects