Income and wealth inequality rose over the first 150 years of US history. They rose in Britain before 1875, especially 1740–1810. The first half of the 20th century equalized pre-fisc incomes both in Britain and in America. From the 1970s to the 1990s inequality rose in both countries,...

High levels of economic inequality may lead to lower economic growth and can have negative social and political impacts. Recent empirical research shows that income and wealth inequalities in Eastern Europe since the fall of socialism increased significantly more than previously suggested....

This paper investigates the sources of inequality in household gross and net wealth across eight euro area countries applying the Shapley value approach to decomposition. The research draws on micro data from the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey 2010. Dispersion in bequests...

European societies have been experiencing growing income and wealth inequalities over the past few decades, and, accordingly, they are a topic of intense discussion. Although the population’s evaluation of inequalities as just or unjust is important for designing social policies, there has...

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....

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...

We investigate pairwise stochastic comparisons of stationary solutions to the linear recurrence 𝑋𝑡+1=𝐴𝑡𝑋𝑡+𝐵𝑡 , where 𝐴𝑡 and 𝐵𝑡 are non-negative random variables. We establish novel order-preserving properties, which enable us to obtain comparison theorems...

One reason for the relatively poor development performance of many countries around the world today may be the high levels of inequality during and after colonisation. Evidence from colonies in the Americas suggests that skewed initial factor endowments could create small elites that own a...

We examine the role of taxation within a simple model of wealth accumulation transmission from generation to generation. It turns out that the role of bequest taxation may be central to the development of inequality in the long run. Whether it does so depends on the the way that consumption...