Daniel Waldenström

Intergenerational Mobility of Wealth

In a recently published paper in the Economic Journal, Daniel Waldenström (jointly with Adermon and Lindahl) have studied the intergenerational mobility of wealth among households in Sweden for up to four generations and study, for the first time, the explicit role of bequests in this process. Their main finding is that bequests are crucial for mobility, accounting for up to half of the recorded transmission of wealth status from one generation to another. In an ongoing project, Mr Waldenström is estimating the distributional national accounts of Sweden, which means merging the macro (national accounts) and micro (population registers) dimensions of income and wealth in order to gain a better understanding of the full distributional and redistributional scope of the economy.

In another ongoing project, he is compiling a large database on global earnings across occupational groups to estimate the level and trends in global earnings inequality as well as the determinants of earnings dispersion. Finally, he is also studying aspects of capital taxation, with one paper offering a survey of the recent theoretical and empirical advancements and another study presenting a survey experiment where he estimates the effect of information on wealth distribution on people’s political support for capital taxation.

Mr Waldenström’s research interests concern income and wealth inequality, taxation, intergenerational mobility and economic history. He has worked on the long-term trends in inequality in the Western world, studying particularly top income shares and their determinants.

Daniel Waldenström is currently Visiting Professor at the Paris School of Economics and Senior Fellow at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm. Between 2011 and 2016, he was Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics, Uppsala University. He holds a PhD in Economics from the Stockholm School of Economics and a second PhD, in Economic History, from Lund University.