Changes in the Distribution of Black and White Wealth Since the US Civil War

Ellora Derenoncourt, Chi Hyun Kim, Moritz Kuhn and Moritz Schularick

CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany

Abstract: The difference in the average wealth of Black and white Americans narrowed in the first century after the Civil War, but remained large and even widened again after 1980. Given high levels of wealth concentration both historically and today, dynamics at the average may not capture important heterogeneity in racial wealth gaps across the distribution. This paper looks into the historical evolution of the Black and white wealth distributions since Emancipation. The picture that emerges is an even starker one than racial wealth inequality at the mean. Tracing, for the first time, the evolution of wealth of the median Black household and the gap between the typical Black and white household over time, we estimate that the majority of Black households only began to dispose of measurable wealth around World War II. While the civil rights era brought substantial wealth gains for the median Black household, the gap between Black and white wealth at the median has not changed much since the 1970s. The top and the bottom of the wealth distribution show even greater persistence, with Black households consistently over-represented in the bottom half of the wealth distribution and under-represented in the top-10% over the past seven decades.

Keywords: Racial wealth inequality; distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 E21 J15 N11 N12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27
Date: 2024-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp507 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2024_507

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany Kaiserstr. 1, 53113 Bonn , Germany.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CRC Office ().