IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/iuiwop/1543.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Must Capital Income Increase Long-Term Inequality? Evidence from Sweden 1991–2021

Author

Listed:
  • Bergh, Andreas

    (Department of Economics, Lund University, and)

  • Nordin, Martin

    (AgriFood Economics Centre and Department of Economics)

Abstract

Capital income is known to increase income inequality when measured on an annual basis, but the role of personal capital income in long-run inequality is rarely studied. Theoretically, capital income can increase or decrease long-term inequality depending on the correlation with other income. We examine, using Swedish register data, the evolution of annual and long-term income inequality in Sweden 1991–2021, using disposable income with and without capital income. Capital income had a marginally equalizing effect on long-term inequality for the period 1991 to 2006 but added substantially to long-term inequality for the period 2007 to 2021. To fully understand the distributional effects of capital income, a long-term perspective is needed.

Suggested Citation

  • Bergh, Andreas & Nordin, Martin, 2025. "Must Capital Income Increase Long-Term Inequality? Evidence from Sweden 1991–2021," Working Paper Series 1543, Research Institute of Industrial Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1543
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ifn.se/wfiles/wp/wp1543.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • E22 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Investment; Capital; Intangible Capital; Capacity

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1543. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Elisabeth Gustafsson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iuiiise.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.