Economic inequality in America continues to grow, taking on ever greater economic and political importance. The reasons for increasing inequality are complex and widely debated, as are potential policies to address it. This paper focuses on a vital but unrecognized part of the story: how the...

Two things have happened to the wealth of American households since the Great Recession started in 2007. First, the distribution became much more unequal; second, the wealth of the typical family dropped sharply, and, at least through 2016, did not recover. These changes are largely due to the...

After almost a decade of increasing inequality during the Great Recession and its aftermath (as documented in previous RIHA report, The Distribution of Wealth Since the Great Recession, covering 2007-2016), the distribution of wealth in the United States became somewhat more equal between 2016...

This paper studies the effects of quantitative easing on income and wealth of individual euro area households. The aggregate effects of quantitative easing are estimated in a multi-country VAR model of the four largest euro area countries, in which key variables affecting household income and...

Individuals with assets in the millions of euros have been underrepresented in population surveys and accordingly little has been known about them. As a result, the full extent of wealth concentration in Germany was unknown. To close the existing data gap, the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) inte-...

Recent advances in behavioral genetics have enabled the discovery of genetic scores linked to a variety of economic outcomes, including education. We build on this progress to demonstrate that the same genetic variants that predict educational attainment independently predict household wealth in...

This paper studies the effects of quantitative easing on income and wealth of individual euro area households. The aggregate effects of quantitative easing are estimated in a multi-country VAR model of the four largest euro area countries, in which key variables affecting household income and...

In early April 2020 we conducted a survey on a representative sample of more than 8,000 US households to study the effect of the coronavirus crisis on household income and retirement wealth, households’ expectations about the recovery, and the impact of the shock on individuals’ economic...

Private wealth is a crucial factor for the economic well‐being of households. Key determinants of private wealth include intergenerational wealth transfers (gifts and inheritances), which are gaining importance since 1990, as research suggests. We conduct a detailed investigation of the...

What are the social-economic consequences of financial market bubbles and crashes? Using novel comprehensive administrative data from China, we document a substantial increase in inequality of wealth held in risky assets by Chinese households in the 2014-15 bubble-crash episode: the largest 0.5%...