This paper summarizes the main findings and perspectives emerging from a collective research project on the dynamics of income and wealth distribution. The primary objective of this project is to construct a high-quality, longrun, international database on income and wealth concentration, using historical tax statistics. The resulting database now includes annual series covering most of the twe...

BACKGROUND This study explores the relationship between BMI and national-wealth and the cross-level interaction effect of national-wealth and individual household-wealth using multilevel analysis. METHODS Data from the World Health Survey conducted in 2002-2004, across 70 low-, middle- and high-income countries was used. Participants aged 18 years and over were selected using multistage, stra...

This paper argues that income inequality has increased in several, but not all, developed countries over the last twenty years. The increase in some countries supports the conclusion that the deregulation of markets, resulting in the concentration of economic power, is the fundamental cause as well as the gross manifestation of inequality of both income and wealth. JEL classifi cation: D30 (Gen...

Amy Stubbendick for outstanding research assistance in the work reported here. Barry Johnson has long been an essential player in the work underlying this paper, and he provided essential data used in the analysis. The opinions expressed here are the responsibility of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Most often, econo...

We investigate the effects of different forms and sources of income (labor, asset, welfare, and other transfers) and wealth (home equity and other wealth) on household charitable donations (total, religious, secular, combined causes, and the needy) using data from the philanthropy module of the PSID. There are significant differences among income and wealth elasticities from each source. Thus w...

It has long been argued that promoting homeownership among low-income households is worthwhile because owned housing may be an important source of savings for these families, and that children raised in owned housing are likely to be more successful well-adjusted members of society. This paper employs the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and a dynamic estimating technique to examine the effect of...

Friedman’s contribution to the consumption literature goes well beyond the seminal permanentincome hypothesis. He conjectured that the marginal propensity to consume out of financial wealth shall be larger than out of ‘‘human wealth’’, the present discounted value of future labor income. I present an explicitly solved model to deliver this widely noted consumption property by specifying that th...

BACKGROUND Socio-economic status has been associated with diabetes in cross-sectional studies. This study aimed to evaluate associations of household income and wealth with both prevalent and incident diabetes among older adults in the UK. It also evaluated the association between obesity and socio-economic status. METHODS A cohort of people aged ≥50 years was selected from the English Longit...