Building a new national data infrastructure for the study of wealth inequality and wealth mobility

Grant description:

Previous research indicates that wealth inequality in the United States has increased since the mid-20th century and is much higher than income inequality. Wealth inequality is particularly worrisome since wealth provides many advantages, including securing against shocks and transferability to the next generation. Yet despite the relevance of wealth for our understanding of inequality and mobility, available data on wealth inequality is limited.

This project will make an important contribution by drawing on tax data linked to external data on housing equity to overcome the limitations of survey data and by linking these data across generations within families and by generating geographic aggregates at small-scale geographical levels. This will allow the author to answer pressing questions, such as how concentrated wealth is locally and the stickiness of the wealth distribution across generations.