A study of the changes in wealth and its distribution in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Paris that maps the interplay among wealth, inequality, and welfare
Successful economies sustain capital accumulation across generations, and capital accumulation leads to large increases in private wealth. In this book, Gilles Postel-Vinay and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal map the fluctuations in wealth and its distribution in Paris between 1807 and 1977. Drawing on a unique dataset of the bequests of almost 800,000 Parisians, they show that real wealth per decedent varied immensely during this period while inequality began high and declined only slowly. Parisians' portfolios document startling changes in the geography and types of wealth over time.
Postel-Vinay and Rosenthal's account reveals the impact of economic factors (large shocks, technological changes, differential returns to wealth), political factors (changes in taxation), and demographic and social factors (age and gender) on wealth and inequality. Before World War I, private wealth was highly predictive of other indicators of welfare, including different forms of human capital, age at death, and access to local public goods. After World War I, public intervention reduced-but did not eliminate-the strong connection between wealth inequality and other forms of inequality. Over the two centuries covered, Paris and its wealth were on the vanguard of economic and social change that affected the rest of the country a generation later. Gilles Postel-Vinay is professor emeritus at the Paris School of Economics. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal is the Rea and Lela Axline Professor of Business Economics at the California Institute of Technology. They have coauthored three previous books, including Dark Matter Credit: The Development of Peer-to-Peer Lending and Banking in France (Princeton). "Every economic historian knows that anything Postel-Vinay and Rosenthal write is essential reading. Their latest tour de force not only delves deeper than ever before into archival data, but also teaches us how to incorporate the allocation of public services and other overlooked dimensions of wealth distribution into the study of economic inequality."-Francesca Trivellato, Institute for Advanced Study
"This is a monumental contribution to our understanding of wealth accumulation and wealth inequality. Based on a quarter century of research and a rare historical context that allows for tracking wealth trends over the long run, Postel-Vinay and Rosenthal have given us an unparalleled picture of Parisian wealth and the factors that drove it."-David Stasavage, author of The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today
"Postel-Vinay and Rosenthal masterfully exploit Parisian inheritance tax records that extend over two centuries and cover not just the rich, which in the capital could be very rich, but also a broader spectrum of those with positive balances at death, especially in the twentieth century. Who, at what point, benefitted or lost out the most by holding stocks and bonds versus real estate or a simple pension, and how did revolutions, wars, depressions, and socialist regimes affect those outcomes? It is all here."-Carole Shammas, University of Southern California
"To capture how economic inequality relates to politics, government interventions, and wartime shocks, one can do no better than to study what happened in Paris over the last two hundred years. With their massive accounting of Parisians' wealth at death, Postel-Vinay and Rosenthal reveal what changed and what did not. Wealth inequality changed greatly in response to all these forces. Yet spatial inequalities never changed despite massive wealth accumulation, in ways ably mapped and explained by these two renowned economic historians."-Peter Lindert, coauthor of Making Social Spending Work and Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700
"This book
