Recent research highlighted controversy about the evolution of concentration of personal wealth. In this paper we provide new evidence about the long-run evolution of top wealth shares for the United Kingdom. The new series covers a long period – from 1895 to the present – and has a...

The historical fertility transition is the process by which much of Europe and North America went from high to low fertility in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This transformation is central to recent accounts of long-run economic growth. Prior to the transition, women bore as many...

What are the long-term economic effects of a more equal distribution of wealth? We exploit variation in historical inheritance rules for land in Germany. In some German areas, inherited land was to be shared or divided equally among children, while in others land was ruled to be indivisible....

This volume showcases universal old-age and disability pensions as well as universal maternity and child protection schemes in developing countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Cabo Verde, China, Colombia, Lesotho, Mongolia, Rwanda, South Africa, Thailand, Timor Leste and Trinidad and Tobago. The...

In diesem Beitrag werden der erste Lastenausgleich, der im Zusammenhang mit der Gründung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1948/1949 stattfand, und der - nicht so benannte - zweite Lastenausgleich nach der deutschen Wiedervereinigung 1990 analysiert und verglichen. Beim ersten Lastenausgleich ging...

This paper studies the estimation of wealth distribution using estates left at death. We establish formal conditions for adopting a simplied version of the classic estate multi- plier method, using only minimal information on estates and mortality. We empirically validate these conditions and...

The authors present data on annual retirement income of American Indians and Alaska Natives (AIANs) from the American Community Survey and include separate analyses for AIANs of single-race and multiple-race backgrounds. The authors also compare retirement income of AIANs with that of whites and...

In the absence of a wealth register, Belgian wealth inequality needs to be estimated. Here I apply the mortality multiplier approach to Belgian inheritance tax tabulations and administrative microdata, collectively covering 1935 to 2022. Belgian wealth inequality has strongly declined during the...