Swedish Distributional National Accounts: New Perspectives on Income and Wealth Inequality in Sweden, 1930-2020

This project examines new perspectives on the evolution of economic inequality in Sweden.

About one-third of incomes in the national accounts are not reported on tax returns nor in official distribution statistics.

The purpose of the project is to bridge the gap between micro registers and macro accounts by constructing and analyzing distributional national accounts for Sweden.

In a first stage, which builds on a previous project, a new database is constructed by carefully matching variables in administrative microdata registers with their corresponding components in the national accounts. The methods also build on a growing literature on distributional national accounts.

In a second stage, the new database will be used to generate studies of distributional trends, mobility patterns, and tax-reform effects.Three main contributions are generated.

First, we provide the first full population analysis of distributional national accounts using individual register data.

This includes harmonizing the partially incomplete Swedish register data, computing a new series on wealth inequality, and expanding income inequality series back to 1930.

Second, we are the first to estimate income and wealth mobility patterns in the distributed national accounts literature, both within-life spans and across generations. Third, we measure the distributional and behavioral impacts of tax reforms that have not been previously studied.