Wir gehen der Frage nach, ob die gegenwärtige Vermögensungleichheit in Deutschland auf eine Dominanz von Erbschaften im oberen Bereich der Verteilung zurückzuführen ist. Auf Basis der PHF-Daten finden wir, dass die Vermögen der Deutschen zu etwa zwei Dritteln auf Eigenleistung und zu etwa...

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...

Survey data tends to be biased toward the middle class. Often it fails to adequately cover the highly relevant group of multi-millionaires and billionaires, which in turn results in biased estimates for aggregate wealth and top wealth shares. In order to overcome the under coverage and obtain...

We use data from the European Household Finance and Consumption Survey in order to examine the distributional effect of intergenerational wealth transfers on the net worth distribution in 8 European countries and compare it to recent findings for the US. To do so, we resort to the decomposition...