S ince the early 2000s, research by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez (and their coauthors, including Anthony Atkinson and Gabriel Zucman) has revolutionized our understanding of income and wealth inequality. The crucial point of departure for this revolution is the extensive data they have used, based largely on administrative tax records. Piketty’s (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century is...

Researchers, analysts and policymakers who are concerned with economic inequality, family financial security, and poverty in the USA used to focus their analysis entirely on income and consumption. Today, the importance of wealth and asset holdings—not just income streams—in ensuring and maintaining economic well-being is widely recognized. With this shift in understanding, measures of economic...

Can a transfer of wealth from the US to developing countries be Pareto improving? We analyze this question in an open-economy innovation-driven growth model, in which the highincome (low-income) country produces innovative (homogenous) goods. We find that wealth redistribution to the low-income country simultaneously reduces global inequality and stimulates innovation through an increase in lab...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To determine whether measures of income and wealth are associated with poor self rated health and GHQ depression. DESIGN Whitehall II study of London based civil servants re-interviewed between 1997-1999; 7162 participants. MAIN RESULTS A twofold age adjusted difference in morbidity was observed between the top and bottom of the personal income hierarchy for both sexes. For ...

This chapter offers an overview of the empirical and theoretical research on the long-run evolution of wealth and inheritance. Wealth–income ratios, inherited wealth, and wealth inequalities were high in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries up until World War I, then sharply dropped during the twentieth century following World War shocks, and have been rising again in the late twentieth and e...

The extent of and changes in inter-generational mobility of wealth are central to understanding dynamics of wealth inequality but hard to measure. Using estate tax returns data, we observe that the share of women among the very wealthy (top 0.01%) in the United States peaked in the late 1960s, reaching almost 50%. Three decades on, women’s share had declined to one third, a return to pre-war le...