Mit seinem Weltbestseller "Das Kapital im 21. Jahrhundert" hat Thomas Piketty eine heftige Kontroverse über die wachsende Ungleichheit in den westlichen Gesellschaften und deren Ursachen ausgelöst. Nun folgt der "World Inequality Report" - der gründlichste und aktuellste Bericht zur Lage der...

Recent estimates of US top wealth shares obtained by capitalizing income tax returns (Saez and Zucman, 2020; Smith, Zidar and Zwick, 2022) are close in both levels and trends except for the top 0.01% where a large discrepancy remains. We examine this difference and, using public data, quantify three...

This paper combines income tax returns with Flow of Funds data to estimate the distribution of household wealth in the United States since 1913. We estimate wealth by capitalizing the incomes reported by individual taxpayers, accounting for assets that do not generate taxable income. We...