Wealth and Mobility Study (WAM)
Project Summary
Through secure, direct access to IRS tax records, WAM is finalizing the creation of measures of the income and wealth holdings of the entire U.S. population and their linking across generations, extending pioneering work by Raj Chetty and collaborators, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, and others.
WAM will publicly release a large, granular set of statistics based on these measures, both at the national level and across multiple subnational geographies. This new data infrastructure will enable novel analyses of wealth inequality and mobility. WAM also prioritizes user-friendly dissemination to make the data easily accessible to local, state, and federal policymakers, community organizations, journalists, and the broader public.
WAM will analyze the levels, inequality, segregation, and intergenerational mobility of wealth and income across the full U.S. population, in order to answer questions such as:
- How does per-capita wealth vary across the country?
- How do wealth and income disparities differ across states and counties?
- How does residential segregation by wealth compare with segregation by income?
- How strong are the intergenerational correlations in wealth and in income?
- Which U.S. areas exhibit higher and lower rates of intergenerational wealth mobility?
Investigators
Pablo A Mitnik, Joe LaBriola