The Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) provides information about household wealth (real and financial assets as well as liabilities) from 15 Euro-countries after the financial crisis of 2007/8. The survey will be the central dataset in this topic in the future. However, several...

The Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) provides information about house-hold wealth (real and financial assets as well as liabilities) from 15 Euro-countries around the year 2010 (first wave). The survey will be the central dataset in this topic in the future. However, several...

Our objective is to study the dynamics of the wealth distribution over the path of economic development. More specifically, we are interested in distinguishing between changes which seem to be country specific and characteristics shared by all countries. A historical account of the evolution of...

We study the dynamics of capital accumulation, income inequality, capital concentration, and voting up to 1914. Based on new panel data for Prussian regions, we re-evaluate the famous Revisionism Debate between orthodox Marxists and their critics. We show that changes in capital accumulation led...

Taxation data have been used to create long-run series for the distribution of top incomes in quite a number of countries. Most of these studies have focused on the national experience of individual countries, but we can also learn from cross-country comparisons. Comparative analysis is...

This article outlines income and wealth distribution trends in Germany since the 19th century, compared to other Western industrialised countries. We first discuss the evolution of aggregate wealth-to-income ratios. We then explore how the concentration of income and wealth among the top...

The recently published Household Finance and Consumption Survey has revealed large differences in wealth inequality between the countries of the Euro area. We find a strong negative correlation between wealth inequality and homeownership rates across countries. We use two decomposition methods...

To help shed light on the implications of intergenerational transfers for wealth inequality, this paper examines whether or not individuals who receive intergenerational transfers from their parents are more likely to leave bequests to their children than those who do not using data for Japan...

This paper analyses the joint long-run evolution of wealth and income inequality. We show that top wealth and income shares were cointegrated over the past century in France and the US. We rationalise this finding using a two-agent version of the Solow growth model. In this framework, the...

We design a series of simulation-based thought experiments to deductively evaluate the causal effects of various factors on wealth inequality (the distribution) and social mobility (dynamics of the distribution). We find that uncertainty per se can lead to a “natural” degree of inequality...