This paper examines long-term trends in aggregate wealth and inheritance and in their distributions, focusing on … developed economies. A key stylized fact is that wealth is less equally distributed than income. Financial assets predominate … among the wealthy, while owner-occupied housing is crucial for middle groups, so higher stock prices raise wealth inequality …

wealth is difficult to establish due to many potential sources of endogeneity. Utilizing the Household Finance and … instrument. The exclusion restriction is that conditional on the total amount of inheritance, inheriting a home affects the … wealth position of the household only through homeownership. For the sample of inheritors we find that the local average …

well as at all levels of net wealth at a point in time. Gifts and inheritances are only an important source of income flows … much different from the actual distribution. Our findings suggest that inheritance taxes may do little to mitigate the … extreme wealth inequality in society. …

insights into the role of country-specific shocks in shaping long-run wealth dynamics. This paper presents the first … comprehensive study of wealth and its distribution in Germany since the 19th century. We combine tax and archival data, household … surveys, historical national accounts, and rich lists to analyze the evolution of the German wealth distribution over the long …

We study how attitudes to inheritance taxation are influenced by information about the role of inherited wealth in … inherited wealth could be one explanation behind the relatively marginalized role of inheritance taxation in developed economies. … aggregate importance of inherited wealth and its link to inequality of opportunity significantly increases the support for …

We use Norwegian administrative panel data on wealth and income between 1993 and 2015 to study lifecycle wealth … capital gains, and save at higher rates. At age 50, the excess wealth of the top 0.1% group relative to mid-wealth households … is accounted for in about equal terms by higher saving rates (34%), higher initial wealth (32%), and higher returns (27 …

% of the super-rich are heirs-a fraction twice as large as in the US-and that wealth mobility at the very top has declined … significantly. We find that top 0.01% wealth shares are higher than previous estimates based on wealth tax statistics suggest. At … the same time, we argue that rich list data lead to overestimating wealth inequality. While rich lists are valuable to …

wealth. To capture the importance of land as an input factor for housing production and for the evolution of wealth in a … housing wealth after Word War II remarkably accurately and accounts for the close connection of house prices to land prices in … the data. It suggests a considerable further increase in housing wealth, relative to income, that is associated with a …

Rising wealth inequality has spurred an increased interest in understanding how and why wealth is correlated across … generations. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in housing wealth driven by home price changes in different areas to isolate … the causal impact of parental housing wealth during different childhood periods on children's long-run wealth accumulation …

The Carnegie effect (Holtz-Eakin, Joualfaian and Rosen, 1993) refers to the idea that inherited wealth harms recipients …