The Challenge of Measuring UK Wealth Inequality in the 2000s

This paper is an outgrowth of the larger project ‘Top Wealth Shares in the UK since 1896’ by the same authors. They thank for helpful comments Daniel Heymann, Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman, the co-editor Thomas Crossley, an anonymous referee and participants at the Household Wealth Data and Public Policy Conference (Bank of England, March 2015), the 16th Trento Summer School (June 2015) and the workshop on measuring inequalities of income and wealth (Berlin, September 2015). The authors are particularly grateful to Alan Newman (Office for National Statistics, ONS), who shared the Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS)-based results submitted to the OECD Wealth Database, and to Sian-Elin Wyatt (ONS), who addressed their inquiries about the WAS response rates. This research received financial support from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), the European Research Council (ERC) and the Economic and Social Research Council / Department for International Development (ESRC-DFID) joint fund (grant ES/I033114/1). The usual disclaimer applies.