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Wealth Inequality in Sweden: What can we Learn from Capitalized Income Tax Data?
Author(s) -
Lundberg Jacob,
Waldenström Daniel
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
review of income and wealth
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.024
H-Index - 57
eISSN - 1475-4991
pISSN - 0034-6586
DOI - 10.1111/roiw.12294
Subject(s) - economics , capitalization , inequality , national wealth , econometrics , property tax , economic inequality , repeal , demographic economics , labour economics , public economics , finance , tax reform , mathematical analysis , philosophy , linguistics , mathematics , political science , law
This paper presents new estimates of wealth inequality in Sweden during 2000–2012, linking wealth register data up to 2007 and individually capitalized wealth based on income and property tax registers for the period thereafter when a repeal of the wealth tax stopped the collection of individual wealth statistics. We find that wealth inequality increased after 2007 and that more unequal bank holdings and housing appear to be important drivers. We also evaluate the performance of the capitalization method by contrasting its estimates and their dispersion with observed stocks in register data up to 2007. The goodness‐of‐fit varies tremendously across assets and we conclude that although capitalized wealth estimates may well approximate overall inequality levels and trends, they are highly sensitive to assumptions and the quality of the underlying data sources.