Estimates of social insurance pension wealth are available for a number of Western economies, including Austria for the year 2017. Such wealth may be compared with conventional wealth in terms of size and distribution and when we add such estimates to measures of wealth in the conventional...

We embed an experiment in a large-scale representative survey to investigate how relative wealth affects risk-taking and how this effect varies as a function of perceived control over life outcomes. Our results contest the common prediction of higher risk-taking in the middle of the...

In this report, we consider policies to help people appropriately manage their defined contribution (DC) pension wealth through later life. We draw on evidence in a report published alongside this one (Boileau, Cribb and Emmerson, 2025), which sets out key information on the landscape in which...

This report is one of two reports on the management of pension wealth in retirement conducted as part of the Pensions Review, led by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in partnership with the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust. In this report, we examine the decisions that older individuals face as...

Accurate and comprehensive measurement of household livelihoods is critical for monitoring progress toward poverty alleviation and targeting social assistance programs for those who most need it. However, the high cost of traditional data collection has historically made comprehensive...

Power law distributions are ubiquitous in socioeconomic contexts. While their general properties are well understood, it is often less clear why they regularly appear in empirical data. What are the generative mechanisms leading to power laws, how do they arise in the real world? This paper aims...

Power law distributions are ubiquitous in socioeconomic contexts. While their general properties are well understood, it is often less clear why they regularly appear in empirical data. What are the generative mechanisms leading to power laws, how do they arise in the real world? This paper aims...

The total wealth of Britain's households in 2018 to 2020 was approximately £2.2 trillion less than was previously believed - a 14% reduction. That, at least, is the implication of a recent change in methodology made by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to the UK's leading official...

The current system of private pension savings in the UK is based on employers choosing a workplace pension provider, to which contributions from the employee and employer are sent, and which invests the contributions on behalf of the employee. This means that when an individual leaves their...

This report examines ethnic differences in pension participation in the UK following the nationwide roll-out of automatic enrolment, the drivers of those gaps, and the consequences for wealth accumulation. It draws on an academic research paper (Cribb, O'Brien and Sturrock, 2025) published...

This report describes patterns of co-residence of young adults at a parental home in the United Kingdom. We show how the rate of co-residence varies across dimensions such as income, region and ethnicity. We show how it has changed in recent years and discuss potential drivers of the rise...

In light of the substantial rise in economic inequality in recent decades across the majority of economies, the relationship between inequality and economic growth has garnered significant attention. However, the specific impact of wealth inequality through various transmission channels on...

The increasing concentration of income and wealth on the national and international level is a topic that has received increased attention both in social science research as well as public policy debates. While data availability is a well-known and often-lamented problem in wealth studies,...

We develop a new method for deriving high-frequency synthetic distributions of consumption, income, and wealth. Modern theories of macroeconomic dynamics identify the joint distribution of consumption, income, and wealth as a key determinant of aggregate dynamics. Our novel method allows us to...

This paper estimates rates of return on wealth across gross wealth groups by matching individual-level survey data with macroeconomic return data for Germany. Using machine learning for more detailed financial asset categories, we find that the average nominal rate of return on gross assets for...

We consider an overlapping generations version of a model suggested by Fargione, Lehmann and Polasky that allows us to show, by means of simulations, that randomness of the rate of return on capital, combined with inheritance of capital and consumption being a concave function of wealth may lead...

Flat tax systems have gained traction in countries that transitioned from socialism, with more than 20 nations in Eastern Europe and Central Asia adopting such systems since the mid-1990s. These reforms aimed to streamline tax processes, enhance compliance, and boost economic growth. While...

We study the effects of envy (relative consumption concerns), drawing on evidence that preferences typically exhibit present bias. We employ a Ramseytype model with agents who differ in initial capital endowments and account for present-biased envy: agents are naive and care about how their...

The growing demand for sustainable business practices has led to the development of corporate sustainability assessment tools, with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) indicators becoming central to non-financial performance evaluation. These metrics increasingly influence investment...

How does economic growth affect individual wealth accumulation and, thereby, wealth inequality? Combining individual wealth from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and local GDP growth across 401 German counties, this paper documents a sizable Hometown-Growth-Wealth Nexus. We find that past...

This study investigates the key drivers behind the wealth accumulation of America's 100 richest self-made billionaires, using data from the Forbes 400 list. Focusing on five individual and contextual factors - education, innovation, networks, inheritance, and geographic origins - the research...

We provide evidence for a new propagation mechanism of wealth inequality and mobility. Using unique administrative data and a quasi-field experiment of exogenous assignment, we find that educated entrants, faced with greater local wealth inequality and salient cases of wealth mobility, take...