This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

Thomas Piketty's widely-noted and bestselling book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, does much to advance our empirical understanding of rising high-end wealth concentration, which is one of the central issues of our time. But its theoretical approach and policy recommendations differ...

This paper argues that an increase in the inequality of wealth prompts a stronger quest for status that in turn fosters the accumulation of wealth. It proposes a measure for an individual's want of social status. For a given level of a population's wealth, the corresponding aggregate measure of...

This paper argues that an increase in the inequality of wealth prompts a stronger quest for status that in turn fosters the accumulation of wealth. It proposes a measure for an individual’s want of social status. For a given level of a population’s wealth, the corresponding aggregate measure...

Socioeconomics,an ever-changing and growing field of study is significantly shaping modern initiatives within the field while also displaying what the factors that affect the perception of this study are to the public. One of the largest topics that socioeconomics aims to address is the rapidly...

This paper investigates methods to estimate the upper tail of the wealth distribution. I compare data types and estimation methods using data from the Netherlands for the period 1993–2018, exploiting the unique availability of multiple types of data for this context. In addition to comparing...

The evolution of income distribution over two centuries is an attractive topic because it allows one to test the inverse U-curve hypothesis using long series instead of cross-section data. In Section 1 the distribution trends in countries where global data are available, is considered, that is...

This chapter offers an overview of the empirical and theoretical research on the long-run evolution of wealth and inheritance. Wealth–income ratios, inherited wealth, and wealth inequalities were high in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries up until World War I, then sharply dropped during...