This paper presents new homogeneous series on top wealth shares from 1916 to 2000 in the United States using estate tax … return data. Top wealth shares were very high at the beginning of the period but have been hit sharply by the Great … wealth shares recovered in the early 1980s, but they are still much lower in 2000 than in the early decades of the century …

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 …