From the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
By Moritz Kuhn, University of Bonn, CEPR, and IZA; Moritz Schularick, University of Bonn and CEPR; and Ulrike I. Steins, University of Bonn.
We live in unequal times. The causes and consequences of widening disparities in income and wealth have become a deﬁning debate of our age. Recent studies have made major inroads into documenting trends in either income or wealth inequality in the United States – Piketty and Saez (2003), Kopczuk, Saez, and Song (2010), Saez and Zucman (2016) – but we still know little about how the joint distributions of income and wealth evolved over the long run.
This paper ﬁlls the gap. The backbone of this study is a newly compiled dataset that builds on household-level information and spans the entire U.S. population over seven decades of postwar American history.