Income and Wealth Inequality in America, 1949–2016

By M. Kuhn, M. Schularick, Ulrike I. Steins. Journal of Political Economy, 2018

301 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper introduces a new long-run data set based on archival data from historical waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances. Studying the joint distribution of household income and wealth, we expose the central importance of portfolio composition and asset prices for wealth dynamics in postwar America. Asset prices shift the wealth distribution because of systematic differences in household portfolios along the wealth distribution. Middle-class portfolios are dominated by housing, while rich households predominantly own business equity. Differential changes in equity and house prices shaped wealth dynamics in postwar America and decoupled the income and wealth distribution over extended periods.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Finance

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2f6404b71ad93a359603c473c1af4123e6c03d06

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In Accounting

1. M. Lenza
2. Jiří Slačálek
3. Ricardo M. Sousa
4. Frank Smets
5. Marek Jarociński

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Jiří Slačálek
2. M. Lenza
3. Marek Jarociński
4. Ricardo M. Sousa
5. Frank Smets

In Finance

1. M. Lenza
2. Jiří Slačálek

Citations in the corpus

• How Does Monetary Policy Affect Income and Wealth Inequality? Evidence from Quantitative Easing in the Euro Area (2018, methodology): “Our analysis has a different focus from the work of Kuhn et al. (2020), which describes the unconditional historical evolution of the US wealth distribution, highlighting the contribution of house prices for the lower 90% of the households and of stock prices for the top 10% (see Martínez-Toledano,…”