A Rolling Tide: Changes in the Distribution of Wealth in the U
By Arthur Kennickell. 2003
123 citations recorded by the source corpus.
From 1989 to 2001, wealth in real terms increased overall among U.S. families. But characterizing distributional changes is much more complex; it depends on the specific questions asked. For example, there is evidence both from Forbes data on the 400 wealthiest Americans and from the SCF, which explicitly excludes families in the Forbes list, that wealth grew relatively strongly at the very top of the distribution. At the same time, the share of total household wealth held by the Forbes group rose. However, while the point estimate of the share of total wealth held by the wealthiest 1 percent of families, as measured by the SCF, also rose, the change is not statistically significant. In 2001, the division of wealth observed in the SCF attributed about a third each to the wealthiest 1 percent, the next wealthiest 9 percent, and the remaining 90 percent of the population. The paper decomposes wealth holdings and distributional shifts in a variety of other ways. Particular attention is given to families with negative net worth, families of older baby boomers, and African American families.
Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/32d79610300855c1ffb5df3b1d84ff5ef46407f8
Citations in the corpus
- U.S. Tax Policy and Health Insurance Demand: Can a Regressive Policy Improve Welfare? (2009, unknown): “Households with net worth of less than $5,000 constitute 20.0% (taken from Kennickell, 2003, averaged over 1989-2001 SCF data) and we use this fraction as a target to match in the benchmark equilibrium.”
- WEALTH INEQUALITY: A SURVEY (2015, unknown): “Standard sampling techniques tend to miss out some of the most interesting wealth holders, the tiny minority of the very, very rich (Kennickell 2006) and some types of asset are difficult to identify or to value.”
- The World Distribution of Household Wealth (2007, unknown): “See Kennickell, 2003, p. 3.”
- WEALTH INEQUALITY: DATA AND MODELS (2005, unknown): “We also mention some facts about the historical trends, although in this paper we do not focus on understanding them (an area on which little work has been done so far).”