Income and Wealth Above the Median: New Measurements and Results for Europe and the United States

Chauvel, Louis; Hartung, Anne; Bar-Haim, Eyal; van Kerm, Philippe

doi:10.1108/S1049-258520190000027007

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Income and Wealth Above the Median: New Measurements and Results for Europe and the United States

Chauvel, Louis; Hartung, Anne; Bar-Haim, Eyal et al.

2019 • In Decancq, Koen; van Kerm, Philippe (Eds.) What Drives Inequality

Peer reviewed

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https://hdl.handle.net/10993/41763

DOI
10.1108/S1049-258520190000027007

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Keywords :

income; wealth; economic inequality

Abstract :

[en] The study of the upper tail of the income and wealth distributions is important to the understanding of economic inequality. By means of the ‘isograph’, a new tool to describe income or wealth distributions, the authors compare wealth and income and wealth-to-income ratios in 16 European countries and the United States using data for years 2013/2014 from the Eurozone Household Finance and Consumption Survey and the US Survey on Consumer Finance. Focussing on the top half of the distribution, the authors find that for households in the top income quintile, wealth-to-income ratios generally increase rapidly with income; the association between high wealth and high incomes is highest among the highest percentiles. There is generally a positive relationship between median wealth in the country and the wealth of the top 1%. However, the United States is an outlier where the median wealth is relatively low but the wealth of the top 1% is extremely high.

Disciplines :

Sociology & social sciences
Social economics

Author, co-author :

Chauvel, Louis ; University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Language and Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education (FLSHASE) > Integrative Research Unit: Social and Individual Development (INSIDE)

Hartung, Anne ; University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Language and Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education (FLSHASE) > Integrative Research Unit: Social and Individual Development (INSIDE)

Bar-Haim, Eyal

van Kerm, Philippe ; University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Language and Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education (FLSHASE) > Integrative Research Unit: Social and Individual Development (INSIDE)

External co-authors :

Language :

English

Title :

Income and Wealth Above the Median: New Measurements and Results for Europe and the United States

Publication date :

2019

Main work title :

What Drives Inequality

Editor :

Decancq, Koen

van Kerm, Philippe

Publisher :

Emerald Publishing Ltd

Collection name :

Research on Economic Inequality, vol 27

Pages :

89-104

Peer reviewed :

Peer reviewed

Focus Area :

Computational Sciences

Available on ORBilu :

since 20 January 2020

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