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...

We examine the hypothesis that capitalist economies generate inequality by looking at the distribution of wealth in a virtual world. Employing the sandbox video game Minecraft as an example of a “pure” market economy, we chose several Minecraft economy servers and collected their respective...

This paper provides a reconstruction of the joint distribution of Italian households' income and wealth in the years ranging from 1968 to 1975. Exploiting the information available in some historical reports recently published by the Bank of Italy, the paper reconstructs synthetic microdata...

This paper looks at the links between inequality of opportunity and views about the underlying processes that support economic success or failure. Unlike income inequality, inequality of opportunity isolates the extent to which inequality in circumstances beyond an individual's control...

We analyze the top tail of the wealth distribution in Germany, France, and Spain based on the first and second wave of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Since top wealth is likely to be underrepresented in household surveys, we integrate big fortunes from rich lists, estimate...

The aim of the paper is to analyze changes in families' assets between 2002 and 2012; to measure changes in the degree of inequality; and to identify which social groups (or classes) have gained from these changes, using the decomposition procedure of the Gini concentration ratio proposed by Dagum...

This paper introduces a new long-run dataset based on archival data from historical waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances. The household-level data allow us to study the joint distributions of household income and wealth since 1949. We expose the central importance of portfolio composition...

Our underlying hypothesis is that technological progress (even neutral) has a big effect on distribution, not only on growth, since rising waves of technical progress cause rising monopoly power. We test it by showing that, since the 1970's, information technology (in short IT) has caused rising...

This study seeks to add to the research on inequality in least developed countries, namely in Mozambique, by measuring and mapping indicators of horizontal wealth inequality along geographic regions and ethnolinguistic identities. Using census data for 1997, 2007, and 2017, we identify possible...

The new Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS) creates for the first time a harmonized cross national database on household assets and liabilities. This paper describes the project, outlines conceptual and practical issues that need to be addressed in preparing harmonized and comparable wealth data...