Nearly 25 years after the German reunification, vastly different living conditions between East and West Germany still remain. This is particularly true for the distribution of net wealth which is of special importance for the well-being of individuals. Wealth provides utility in a number of...

A model is developed for peasant households in land abundant areas who choose between two technologies for land preparation: a manual one and one using draught animals. For draught a minimum number of animals is required so that a technological non convexity exists. It follows that certain...

We use new population-wide register data on inheritances and wealth in Sweden to estimate the causal impact of inheritances on wealth inequality. We find that inheritances reduce relative wealth inequality (e.g., the Gini coefficient falls by 5–10 percent) but that absolute dispersion...

This paper uses SOEP data to study the distributional effect of intergenerational transfers on the wealth distribution of German households. Similar to most other central European countries, Germany is likely to face a period of increasing aggregate bequest flows. At the same time, there is an...

We study beliefs about wealth inequality and preferences for wealth redistribution. For this, we conduct a large-scale online survey in Germany. First, we analyze how well participants are informed about the German wealth distribution and their position in it. Second, we investigate how...

In this paper, we conduct the novel exercise of analyzing the relationship between overall wealth inequality and caste divisions in India using nationally representative surveys on household wealth conducted during 199192 and 200203. According to our findings, the groups in India that are...

Closely following recent innovations in the literature on the multidimensional measurement of poverty, this paper provides similar measures for the top of the distribution using a dual cutoff method to identify individuals, who can be considered as rich in a multidimensional setting. We use this...

The size and composition of assets and liabilities of households differ vastly across the income distribution in euro area countries. This paper shows that differences between income groups in household finance on both sides of the balance sheet contribute to income inequality. The distribution...

This paper applies multidimensional affluence measures to a new dataset on income and wealth in 15 Eurozone countries. We start our analysis by examining the income and wealth distributions separately for each country, and extend it to a multidimensional setting by considering the joint...

This paper argues that an increase in the inequality of wealth prompts a stronger quest for status that in turn fosters the accumulation of wealth. It proposes a measure for an individual’s want of social status. For a given level of a population’s wealth, the corresponding aggregate measure...