Recent research highlighted controversy about the evolution of concentration of personal wealth. In this paper we provide new evidence about the long-run evolution of top wealth shares for the United Kingdom. The new series covers a long period – from 1895 to the present – and has a...

Like the other chapters in this volume of the Handbook of Income Distribution (and its predecessor), the aim of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive review of a particular area of research. We examine the literature on post-1970 trends in poverty and income inequality, up to 2010 or 2011...

Sustainability for a society means long-term viability, but also the ability to cope with economic crises and disasters. Just as with natural disasters, we can minimize the chance of them occurring and set in place policies to protect the world's citizens against their consequences. This paper...

The purpose of this Chartbook is to present a summary of evidence about long-run changes in economic inequality - primarily income, earnings, and wealth - for 25 countries covering more than one hundred years. There is a range of countries and they account for more than a third of the world's...

This paper is prepared as a chapter for the Handbook of Income Distribution, Volume 2 (edited by A. B. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon, Elsevier-North Holland, Forthcoming). Like the other chapters in the volume (and its predecessor), the aim is to provide a comprehensive review of a particular area...

Despite its relevance in 19th-century economics, wealth -its accumulation, composition, and distribution- has largely been neglected in Italian economic history. Filling this gap, we show that between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, Italy presented a historically high value of total...