Missing Wealth Distribution, Wealth Inequality and Anti-Inequality Policies

In decades marked by increasing wealth-to-income ratios and disparities (Piketty & Zucman, 2014), the design of wealth taxes is a pertinent topic in economic discourse (Saez & Zucman, 2022). While only a few countries implement comprehensive wealth taxes, others primarily rely on property taxes and inheritance (or transfer) taxes for wealth transmission across generations. Despite their generally progressive nature, existing wealth taxes exhibit limited redistributive impact due to their small scale (Kuypers et al., 2020). Given the underperformance of current legislation, there is a growing need to study the development of effective wealth taxation strategies to address wealth inequality significantly. However, assessing the role and efficacy of wealth taxes, even in terms of policy design, hinges on the availability of reliable data. Sampling errors, particularly related to missing data, are widely discussed in the literature on wealth and income distribution (...)