Recent studies argue that US inequality has increased less than previously thought, in particular due to a more modest rise of wealth and capital income at the top (Smith et al., 2019; Smith, Zidar and Zwick, 2020; Auten and Splinter, 2019). We examine the claims made in these papers point by point,...

This paper combines income tax returns with Flow of Funds data to estimate the distribution of household wealth in the United States since 1913. We estimate wealth by capitalizing the incomes reported by individual taxpayers, accounting for assets that do not generate taxable income. We...

This paper studies inequality in America through the lens of distributional macroeconomic accounts—comprehensive distributions of the aggregate amount of income and wealth recorded in the official macroeconomic accounts of the United States. We use these distributional macroeconomic accounts...

This paper provides evidence that asset testing of social transfers substantially depresses the liquid wealth of the poor. Our setting is Denmark where the low-income elderly receive an annual payment (around $3,000) if their end-of-year liquid wealth is below a threshold (around $15,000). Using...

At the zero lower bound, the New Keynesian model predicts that output and inflation collapse to implausibly low levels, and that government spending and forward guidance have implausibly large effects. To resolve these anomalies, we introduce wealth into the utility function; the justification...