Housing is the largest capital asset for most families. While the intergenerational mobility literature has extensively studied the income distribution, it has devoted less attention to housing, in part due to data limitations. We document 3 features of intergenerational mobility by comparing...

Die Alterssicherungskommission der Bundesregierung soll einerseits eine Kennziffer für das Gesamtversorgungsniveau aus gesetzlicher Rente, betrieblicher und geförderter Privatvorsorge entwickeln. Andererseits soll es darum gehen, wie der Lebensstandardsicherung im Alter gesichert werden kann....

Reliable statistics on the distribution of wealth - and how this has changed over time - are essential for informing a range of policy debates. Unfortunately, current official statistics from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) do not provide a coherent or consistent guide to how wealth is...

Der Siebte Armuts- und Reichtumsbericht (7. ARB) ist ein umfangreiches, datenbasiertes Werk, das viele relevante Lebensbereiche abdeckt - von Einkommen und Vermögen über Bildung, Gesundheit und Teilhabe bis hin zu neuen Themen wie Klimawandel und subjektiven Erfahrungen von Armut. Gleichzeitig...

Die Alterssicherungskommission der Bundesregierung soll einerseits eine Kennziffer für das Gesamtversorgungsniveau aus gesetzlicher Rente, betrieblicher und geförderter Privatvorsorge entwickeln. Andererseits soll es darum gehen, wie der Lebensstandardsicherung im Alter gesichert werden kann....

Der Siebte Armuts- und Reichtumsbericht (7. ARB) ist ein umfangreiches, datenbasiertes Werk, das viele relevante Lebensbereiche abdeckt - von Einkommen und Vermögen über Bildung, Gesundheit und Teilhabe bis hin zu neuen Themen wie Klimawandel und subjektiven Erfahrungen von Armut. Gleichzeitig...

Using unique administrative data that link privately held firm owners to rich background information, we provide novel evidence on underage children as firm owners. Ownership occurs at all ages 0--17, with a mean age of 12. Childhood ownership is strongly concentrated among high-income families,...

We compare wealth taxes and capital gains taxes in a random growth model with idiosyncratic investment risk. At equal tax revenue, wealth taxes generate higher wealth inequality but also higher wealth mobility than capital gains taxes. The mechanism operates through variance: wealth taxes shift...

The fifth wave of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) offers an updated and comprehensive view of Maltese households' financial position in the post-pandemic period. Based on microdata collected for 2023, this edition introduces two analytical dimensions: in addition to the...

Probability distributions, which are typically used to describe income distributions, are not suitable to describe a population's distribution of wealth because of the existence of negative observations and a large concentration of values close to zero. To overcome these problems, we describe...

To promote social justice and support inclusive development in East Africa, addressing land inequality is essential. Kenya and Uganda illustrate the complex factors driving land inequality in sub Saharan Africa. During colonial times, extensive fertile lands were often alienated from local...

We study beliefs about wealth inequality and preferences for wealth redistribution, drawing on a large-scale online survey in Germany. Specifically, we assess participants' knowledge of the German wealth distribution, their perceived position within it, and the effects of two information...

This paper studies how conventional monetary policy affects household wealth in Malta across the wealth distribution. We combine euro-area macroeconomic responses to a monetary policy shock with household-level microdata on assets, liabilities, income, and consumption from the 2023 Maltese...

We show that high-income buyers earn higher capital gains on housing using detailed transaction data from Denmark. Geographic location statistically accounts for nearly all the difference, with little role for aggregate market timing, property type, or other buyer characteristics. This finding...

While financialization and rising inequalities are often regarded as challenges for fiscal redistribution policies, the role of monetary policy and financial markets is neglected. Although heterodox scholars are drawing attention to the distributional impacts of monetary policy, they are rarely...

This chapter builds on Robert Blecker's pathbreaking, decades-long contributions (Blecker 1989, 1998, 2013; Blecker and Razmi, 2008) which incorporate, among many other contributions, capital flows to the balance of payments constrained growth literature. We link this to the literature on wealth...

We study intragenerational wealth rank mobility, investigating three dimensions: (i) wealth mobility over the life cycle, (ii) heterogeneity in mobility among subgroups and wealth components, and (iii) commonalities and differences across divergent country contexts. We use data from Germany...

This study investigates the motherhood penalty on personal net wealth and public pension wealth, focusing on women born between 1937 and 1989. Expanding upon previous research, we (a) contrast the impact of motherhood on public pension wealth and net wealth, (b) adopt a dynamic perspective by...

We provide new county-level estimates of intergenerational mobility, covering multiple economic concepts: total income, labor income, homeownership, housing wealth, and total wealth. This is possible via small-area estimation techniques and linked survey and administrative data covering millions...

This paper contributes to the literature on augmented wealth (the sum of public pension entitlements and net wealth) along three dimensions. First, it provides new country-specific estimates of augmented wealth for Austria in the year 2017 by combining data from the HFCS (Household Finance and...

Did Southern elites' economic losses from abolition translate into diminished political influence? Using novel census-linked data on state lawmakers across four slave-owning and two Northern states (1850-1880), we document a striking paradox: despite the massive wealth shock of emancipation, the...

This paper traces the trajectory of the billionaire's tax proposal through four recent G20 presidencies: Indonesia (2022), India (2023), Brazil (2024), and South Africa (2025). It explores how the emergence of a coordinated minimum tax on extreme private wealth illustrates both the possibilities...

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...

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...

In this paper, we study the role of wealth transfers in shaping homeownership in Malta. Leveraging data from four waves of the Maltese Household Finance and Consumption Survey, we perform a logistic regression to investigate how financial inflows in the form of gifts or inheritances, affect (i)...

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...

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...

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...