This paper offers new evidence on the sources of cross-country income differences. It exploits the idea that observing immigrant workers from different countries in the same labor market provides an opportunity to estimate their human-capital endowments. These estimates suggest that human and physical capital account for only a fraction of cross-country income differences. For countries below 40 percent of U.S. output per worker, less than half of the output gap relative to the United States is attributed to human and physical capital. (JEL O15, O41, F22)

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This paper investigates the role of discount rate heterogeneity for wealth inequality. The key idea is to infer the distribution of preference parameters from the observed age profile of wealth inequality. The contribution of preference heterogeneity to wealth inequality can then be measured using a quantitative life-cycle model. I find that discount rate heterogeneity increases the Gini coefficient of wealth by around 0.07 to levels that are close to the data. The share of wealth held by the richest 1% of households rises by around 0.04, but falls short of the data by more than 10 percentage points. Discount rate heterogeneity also helps to account for the large wealth inequality observed among households with similar lifetime earnings. r