We study the history and geography of wealth accumulation in the US, using newly collected historical property tax …, and financial), making it one of the first "wealth taxes." Drawing on many historical records, we construct long …-run, consistent, high-frequency wealth series at the county, state, and national levels. We first document the long-term evolution of …

Using administrative wealth records from Denmark, we study the effects of wealth taxes on wealth accumulation. Denmark … used to impose one of the world's highest marginal tax rates on wealth, but this tax was drastically reduced and ultimately … abolished between 1989 and 1997. Due to the specific design of the wealth tax, these changes provide a compelling quasi …

Recent estimates of US top wealth shares obtained by capitalizing income tax returns (Saez and Zucman, 2020; Smith … Exchange Commission data at the shareholder firm level show that billionaires' equity wealth is underestimated by a factor of 2 … undervalued by a factor of 1.2 and top-owned partnerships by up to 2.2. After incorporating these results, the top 0.01% wealth …

When is a wealth tax preferable to a capital income tax? When is the opposite true? More generally, can capital … misallocation of capital. We show that increasing the wealth tax increases aggregate productivity. The gains result from the "use …-it-or-lose-it" effect of wealth taxes when returns are heterogeneous, which causes a reallocation of capital from entrepreneurs with low …

Using panel data for a sample of households in Utah from 1850 to 1900 we find income and wealth age profiles that are … a relationship between age-income and age-wealth profiles that is consistent with a life-cycle model of consumption … given a concave and peaked age-income profile: households accumulate and then begin to draw down wealth holdings, the age-wealth …

This study estimates the magnitude of pension wealth and compares pension wealth to net worth for households in the … likely to be more accurate than the pension data used in previous studies. Pension wealth was estimated under two sets of … assumptions. Under the projected earnings approach, mean pension wealth is $98,291, which represents 43 percent of mean net worth …

We provide a systematic analysis of the properties of individual returns to wealth using twenty years of population … percentile. Second, heterogeneity in returns does not arise merely from differences in the allocation of wealth between safe and … risky assets: returns are heterogeneous even within asset classes. Third, returns are positively correlated with wealth …

Explaining why the concepts of "capital" and "wealth" are distinct, we show that appropriately defined aggregates for … wealth may be (and in the case of some countries appear to be) moving in opposite directions … entailing movements in factor returns and shares and the wealth-income ratio. Standard data on savings cannot be reconciled with …

While financial knowledge is strongly positively related to household wealth, there is also considerable cross … cycle model featuring endogenous financial knowledge accumulation. The model generates substantial wealth inequality, over … wealth accumulation and thus financial knowledge. Our simulations show that endogenous financial knowledge accumulation has …

, bequests, inheritances, inter vivos gifts) and wealth. The main message may be summarized as follows. Empirical evidence on … direction of (1) mixed motives (2) heterogeneity of preferences and (3) importance of retaining control over wealth. These … focus on understanding implications of inequality of inherited wealth: the topic that has been neglected in the past, even …