This essay presents arguments for why precise and reliable estimates of top incomes and top wealth holdings are important for the economic analyses of issues concerning income and wealth distribution. First, I outline the most common theoretical motivations for why a specific focus on the...

Inherited wealth has attracted much attention recently, much due to the research by Thomas Piketty (Piketty, 2011; 2014). The discussion has mainly revolved around a long-run contrast between Europe and the U.S., even though data on explicit historical inheritance flows are only really available for...

This study estimates intergenerational correlations in mid-life wealth across three generations, and a young fourth generation, and examines how much of the parent-child association that can be explained by inheritances. Using a Swedish data set we find parent-child rank correlations of...

We study how attitudes to inheritance taxation are influenced by information about the role of inherited wealth in society. Using a randomized experiment in a register-linked Swedish survey, we find that informing individuals about the large aggregate importance of inherited wealth and its link...

Inherited wealth has attracted much attention recently, much due to the research by Thomas Piketty (Piketty, 2011; 2014). The discussion has mainly revolved around a long-run contrast between Eu-rope and the U.S., even though data on explicit historical inheritance flows are only really available...

This study estimates intergenerational correlations in mid-life wealth across three generations, and a young fourth generation, and examines how much of the parent-child association that can be explained by inheritances. Using a Swedish data set we find parent-child rank correlations of 0.3-0.4...