Abstract

Measuring and understanding the evolution of wealth inequality is a key challenge for researchers, policy makers, and the general public. This paper breaks new ground on this topic by presenting a new method to estimate and study wealth inequality. This method combines fiscal data with household surveys and national accounts in order to provide annual wealth distribution series, with detailed breakdowns by percentiles, age, and assets. Using the case of France as an illustration, we show that the resulting series can be used to better analyze the evolution and the determinants of wealth-inequality dynamics over the 1970–2014 period. We show that the decline in wealth inequality ends in the early 1980s, marking the beginning of a rise in the top 1% wealth share, though with significant fluctuations due largely to asset price movements. Rising inequality in savings rates coupled with highly stratified rates of returns has led to rising wealth concentration in spite of the opposing effect of house price increases. We develop a simple simulation model highlighting how changes in the combination of unequal savings rates, rates of return, and labor earnings that occurred in the early 1980s generated large multiplicative effects that led to radically different steady-state levels of wealth inequality. Taking advantage of the joint distribution of income and wealth, we show that top wealth holders are almost exclusively top capital earners, and increasingly fewer are made up of top labor earners; it has become increasingly difficult in recent decades to access top wealth groups with one's labor income only.

中文翻译：

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财富不平等动态的核算：法国的方法，估计和模拟

摘要

衡量和理解财富不平等的发展是研究人员，政策制定者和公众面临的主要挑战。本文通过提出一种估计和研究财富不平等的新方法，在这一问题上取得了新突破。该方法将财政数据与家庭调查和国民账户相结合，以提供年度财富分配序列，并按百分位数，年龄和资产进行详细分类。以法国为例，我们证明了所得的系列数据可用于更好地分析1970-2014年期间财富不平等动态的演变及其决定因素。我们表明，财富不平等的减少在1980年代初结束，标志着最高1％财富份额开始上升，尽管这主要是由于资产价格变动引起的巨大波动。尽管房价上涨带来不利影响，但储蓄率的不平等加剧，加上回报率高度分层，导致财富集中度上升。我们开发了一个简单的模拟模型，重点介绍了1980年代初期发生的储蓄率，回报率和劳动收入不平等的组合变化如何产生巨大的乘数效应，从而导致财富不平等的稳态水平大不相同。利用收入和财富的共同分配，我们表明顶级财富持有者几乎完全是顶级资本收入者，而由顶级劳工收入组成的人越来越少；近几十年来，仅靠劳动收入进入顶级财富集团变得越来越困难。