How wealthy are the rich?

Arbeitspapier

Underreporting and undersampling biases in top tail wealth, although widely acknowledged, have not been statistically quantified so far, essentially because they are not readily observable. Here we exploit the functional form of power law-like regimes in top tail wealth to derive analytical expressions for these biases, and employ German microdata from a popular survey and rich list to illustrate that tiny differences in non-response rates lead to tail wealth estimates that differ by an order of magnitude, in our case ranging from one to nine trillion euros. Underreporting seriously compounds the problem, and we find that the estimation of totals in scale-free systems oftentimes tends to be spurious. Our findings also suggest that recent debates on the existence of scale- or type-dependence in returns to wealth are ill-posed because the available data cannot discriminate between scale- or typedependence on the one hand, and statistical biases on the other. Yet both economic theory and mathematical formalism indicate that sampling and reporting biases are more plausible explanations for the observed data than scale- or type-dependence.

Object Details

• ISBN: 978-3-943153-87-3
• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: BERG Working Paper Series ; No. 166

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Specific Distributions; Specific Statistics ; Methodology for Collecting, Estimating, and Organizing Microeconomic Data; Data Access ; Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions
• Subject: Wealth inequality ; stochastic growth ; differential non-response ; Hill estimator ; tail index bias

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Schulz, Jan ; Milaković, Mishael
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Bamberg University, Bamberg Economic Research Group (BERG)
• (where): Bamberg
• (when): 2020

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/229178
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET