Intergenerational Wealth Mobility in France, 19th and 20th Century

Article dans une revue: This paper examines intergenerational wealth mobility between fathers and children in France between 1848 and 1960. Considering wealth mobility in the long run requires taking into account not only positional mobility (that is, how families move within a given distribution of wealth), but also structural mobility induced by changes in the distribution of wealth. Such changes are related to two structural phenomena: in the nineteenth century, the rising number of individuals leaving no estate at death and, after World War I, the decline in the number of the very rich who could live off their wealth. The paper studies the movements between these groups and estimates the intergenerational elasticity of wealth, taking into account the persistence at the bottom and at the top.

Auteur(s)

Jérôme Bourdieu, Lionel Kesztenbaum, Gilles Postel-Vinay, Akiko Suwa-Eisenmann

Revue
  • Review of Income and Wealth
Date de publication
  • 2019
Mots-clés
  • Wealth distribution
  • Economic history JEL codes D31
  • Intergenerational mobility
  • France
  • N3
Pages
  • 21-47
Version
  • 1
Volume
  • 65