Billionaires don't necessarily boost growth

The richest 1 percent will soon hold more than half of the world's wealth, and their share will continue to grow. This raises some key questions: Is a higher number of billionaires in a country a positive, as some might argue? Or is there evidence to suggest it is a negative? Leaving aside moral questions, do billionaires accelerate or slow down a country's economic growth?

If it turns out that having more billionaires does not favor higher GDP growth, then the policy suggestion to reduce wealth concentration at the top moves from a moral argument to one about economic growth and prosperity.

This is the set of questions that I, along with Sutirtha Bagchi of Villanova University, Pennsylvania, have examined. Using data on billionaires published by Forbes magazine, we applied econometric techniques and reached a conclusion that will perplex some and delight others: A greater presence of billionaires in a country actually slows down its economic growth.