This paper reviews the long run developments in the distribution of personal income and wealth. It also discusses suggested explanations for the observed patterns. We try to answer questions such as: What do we know, and how do we know, about the distribution of income and wealth over time? Are...

This paper reviews the long run developments in the distribution of personal income and wealth. It also discusses suggested explanations for the observed patterns. We try to answer questions such as: What do we know, and how do we know, about the distribution of income and wealth over time? Are...

German history over the past 125 years has been turbulent. Marked by two world wars, revolutions and major regime changes, as well as a hyperinflation and three currency reforms, expropriations and territorial divisions, it provides unique insights into the role of country-specific shocks in...

The financial and economic crisis that have shaken many countries in the last years have increased demand for timely, coherent and consistent distributional information for the household sector. In the Euro area, most of the national central banks collect such information through income and...

Spain has experienced a dramatic business cycle, starting with a large construction based boom followed by a long recession, resulting in a substantial rise in unemployment, and income and wealth inequality. This paper uses longitudinal data from the Survey of Household Finances over the period...

We use historical publications and – for more recent years – micro-data from the income tax and wealth tax returns to estimate the development in income inequality in Denmark over the last 140 years. The paper breaks new ground in treating the specific features of the Danish Tax system and...

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...

This paper presents homogenous series of top income shares in Sweden from 1903 to 2003 using individual tax returns data. We find that Swedish top incomes have developed more similarly to the US, Canada and the UK than to other continental European countries when capital gains are included. The...

Recent studies have used regression decomposition to analyze recent data and found that over seventy percent of the black-white wealth differences remained unexplained (See, e.g., Gittleman and Wolff 2000; Altonji, Doraszelski and Segal 2000; and Blau and Graham 1990). Their results are limited to the...

This chapter reviews the long-run developments in the distribution of personal income and wealth. It also discusses suggested explanations for the observed patterns. We try to answer questions such as: What do we know, and how do we know, about the distribution of income and wealth over time?...