While most studies on wealth inequality focus on the inequality between households, this paper examines the distribution of wealth within couples. For this purpose, we make use of unique individual level micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). In married and cohabiting...

The recent literature has argued for high concentration of earnings, differences in rates of return on assets and bequests as potential determinants of the high level of wealth concentration in the US. Analyzing the joint distribution of earnings, capital income and net worth, we find evidence...

This paper describes trends in parental wealth homogamy among union cohorts formed between 1987 and 2013 in Denmark. Using high-quality register data on the wealth of parents during the year of partnering, we show that the correlation between partners' levels of parental wealth is considerably...

In this paper, we develop and numerically solve a model of idiosyncratic labour income and idiosyncratic interest rates to predict the evolution of a wealth distribution over time. Stochastic labour income follows a deterministic growth trend and it fluctuates between a wage and unemployment...

This paper reviews the long run developments in the distribution of personal income and wealth. It also discusses suggested explanations for the observed patterns. We try to answer questions such as: What do we know, and how do we know, about the distribution of income and wealth over time? Are...

This paper considers a parametric model for the joint distribution of income and wealth. The model is used to analyze income and wealth inequality in five OECD countries using comparable household-level survey data. We focus on the dependence parameter between the two variables and study whether...

This paper applies multidimensional affluence measures to a new dataset on income and wealth in 15 Eurozone countries. We start our analysis by examining the income and wealth distributions separately for each country, and extend it to a multidimensional setting by considering the joint...

This paper presents new estimates of wealth inequality in Sweden during 2000–2012, linking wealth register data up to 2007 and individually capitalized wealth based on income and property tax registers for the period thereafter when a repeal of the wealth tax stopped the collection of...

Closely following recent innovations in the literature on the multidimensional measurement of poverty, this paper provides similar measures for the top of the distribution using a dual cutoff method to identify individuals, who can be considered as rich in a multidimensional setting. We use this...

A fundamental question in social sciences relates to the effect of wealth inequality on economic growth. Yet, in tackling the question, researchers have had to use income as a proxy for wealth. We derive a global measure of wealth inequality from Forbes magazine's listing of billionaires and...