Women, Wealth and Mobility

Lena Edlund () and Wojciech Kopczuk

No 13162, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The extent of and changes in inter-generational mobility of wealth are central to understanding dynamics of wealth inequality but hard to measure. Using estate tax returns data, we observe that the share of women among the very wealthy (top 0.01%) in the United States peaked in the late 1960s, reaching almost 50%. Three decades on, women's share had declined to one third, a return to pre-war levels. We argue that this pattern mirrors the relative importance of inherited vs. self-made wealth in the economy and thus the gender-composition of the wealthiest may serve as a proxy for inter-generational wealth mobility. This proxy for "dynastic wealth'' suggests that wealth mobility in the past century decreased until the 1970s and rose thereafter, a pattern consistent with technological change driving long term trends in income inequality and mobility. Greater wealth mobility in recent decades is also consistent with the simultaneous rise in top income shares and relatively stable wealth concentration.

JEL-codes: D31 J62 N32 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
Note: DAE EFG LS PE PR
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published as Lena Edlund & Wojciech Kopczuk, 2009. "Women, Wealth, and Mobility," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(1), pages 146-78, March.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13162.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Women, Wealth, and Mobility (2009)
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:nbr:nberwo:13162

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13162

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().