Monday, February 7th, 2022
12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. ET
via Zoom
We were pleased to invite you to the 16th webinar of the “Facing Inequality” series, hosted by the Institute for International Economic Policy. In this webinar, Dr. Charlotte Bartels discussed her current research on “The Distribution of Wealth in Germany, 1895 to 2018.” This event featured Federal Reserve Principal Economist Alice Henriques Volz as a discussant. IIEP Director Jay Shambaugh provided welcoming remarks and moderated the event.
Dr. Bartels presented the first comprehensive study of the long-run evolution of wealth inequality in Germany. Her paper presents a combination of tax data, surveys, national accounts and rich lists used to study wealth and its distribution in Germany from 1895 to 2018. Her research finds that in the long run, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the top 1% has fallen by half, from close to 50% in 1895 to 27% today. Nearly all of this decline was the result of various shocks that occurred between 1914 and 1952. The interwar period as well as World War II and its aftermath stand out as the great equalizers in 20th century German history. Her research also shows that two off-setting trends have shaped the German wealth distribution since unification. Households at the top made substantial capital gains from rising equity valuations that were counterbalanced by large middle-class capital gains from rising house prices and substantial savings. By contrast, the wealth share of the bottom 50% has halved in the past 30 years.
The “Facing Inequality” virtual series focuses on current and emerging inequality issues in the U.S. and around the globe – especially those revealed by the current COVID-19 pandemic. It brings together historians, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and epidemiologists, within the academy and without, to present work and discuss ideas that can facilitate new interdisciplinary approaches to the problem of inequality. This is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invite you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Charlotte Bartels is a post-doctoral researcher at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW). For the academic year 2021/2022, she is a Kennedy fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. In 2020, she was Visiting Associate Professor at the City University New York (CUNY). Her research interests lie in the fields of public economics, labor economics and economic history. She is particularly concerned with the long-run dynamics of income and wealth distributions and the political consequences of rising inequality. Another focus of her research is the redistributive and stabilizing impact of welfare state institutions and their incentives. She contributes to the German series for the World Inequality Database (WID). Bartels received her Ph.D. in economics from the Freie Universität Berlin.
About the Discussants:
Alice Henriques Volz is a principal economist at the Federal Reserve Board. At the Board, Alice works in the Microeconomic Surveys section, which oversees the Survey of Consumer Finances. Her research interests focus on inequality and retirement. Current research projects include retirement preparation across cohorts and the wealth distribution and understanding trends in wealth and income inequality. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University and a B.A. from University of California at Berkeley.
Trevor Jackson is an assistant professor of economic history at George Washington University, where he teaches the history of inequality and economic crisis. He works on early modern European economic history, with an emphasis on inequality and financial crisis. His book manuscript, Impunity and Capitalism: Afterlives of European Financial Crisis, 1680-1830, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. It examines how changes in the scope for prosecutorial discretion, technical complexity, and the international mobility of capital diffused the capacity to act with impunity in the economy across the very long eighteenth century. The project argues that impunity has shifted from the sole possession of a legally-immune sovereign to a functional characteristic of technically-skilled professional managers of capital, to an imagined quality of markets themselves, such that a constituent element of the modern economic sphere is that within it, great harm can and will happen to great many people, and nobody will be at fault. Dr. Jackson has taught courses on international economic history ranging from the early modern period to the twentieth century, as well as courses on capitalism and inequality, the history of economic crisis, and the history of human rights. Prior to joining the faculty at the George Washington University, he lectured at the University of California, Berkeley.
About the Moderator:
Jay Shambaugh is Professor of Economics and International Affairs, and Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. His area of research is macroeconomics and international economics. He has had two stints in public service. He served as a Member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors from 2015-2017. Earlier, he served on the staff of the CEA as a Senior Economist for International Economics and then as the Chief Economist. He also spent 3 years as the Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. Jay is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER and Non-Resident Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings. Prior to joining the faculty at George Washington, Jay taught at Georgetown and Dartmouth and was a visiting scholar at the IMF. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. from the Fletcher School at Tufts, and a B.A. from Yale University.
