The literature has typically found that the distribution of socioeconomic factors like education, labor status and income does not account for the remarkablewealth inequality disparities between countries.As a result, their different institutions and other latent factors receive all the credit....

By inverting Saez (2002)'s model of optimal income taxation, we characterize the redistributive preferences of the Irish government between 1987 and 2005. The (marginal) social welfare function revealed by this approach is consistently comparable over time and show great stability despite...

This paper describes how household wealth is distributed in 28 OECD countries, based on evidence from the second wave of the OECD Wealth Distribution Database. A number of general patterns emerge from these data. First, wealth concentration is twice the level of income inequality: across the 28...

This chapter is concerned with the distribution of personal wealth, which usually refers to the material assets that can be sold in the marketpace, although on occasion pension rights are also included. We summarise the available evidence on wealth distribution for a number of countries. This...

Social security entitlements are a substantial source of wealth that grows in importance over the individual's lifecycle. Despite its quantitative relevance, social security wealth has been thus far omitted from wealth inequality analyses. In Germany, it is the lack of adequate micro data that...

We analyze the top tail of the wealth distribution in Germany, France, Spain, and Greece based on the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Since top wealth is likely to be underrepresented in household surveys we integrate the big fortunes from rich lists, estimate a Pareto...

It is a well-known criticism that due to its exponential distribution, survey data on wealth is hardly reliable when it comes to analyzing the richest parts of society. This paper addresses this criticism using Austrian data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). In doing so...

For many years, the cross-sectional Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) has shown relatively weak or inconsistent changes in the shape of the distribution of net worth, despite many shifts in income and other economic factors. In 2009, households that had taken part in the 2007 SCF were...