Differences in individual wealth holdings are widely viewed as a driving force of economic inequality. However, as this finding relies on cross-section data, a concern is that one confuses older with wealthier. We propose a new method to adjust for age effects in cross-sections, which eliminates...

We demonstrate how age-adjusted inequality measures can be used to evaluate whether changes in inequality over time are because of changes in the age structure. In particular, we explore the hypothesis that the substantial rise in earnings inequality since the early 1980s is driven by the large...