Rich List Research Articles

To What Extend Does Jewish Business Thinking Model and Practise Affect Modern Enterprise Management in Chinese Fashion Industry

Jewish is famous for its business tradition, wisdom and creativity. According to Forbes' Rich list published in 2022, the total number of people on the list in 2022 is 2,668, of which 267 are Jewish. It is reported that 11.6 percent of the world's billionaires have Jewish backgrounds and they take up about 13 percent of the wealth in the world. Advantages such as focus on education and learning, concentrating on budget conscious and stimulate innovation, and focusing on corporate social responsibility are worth learning for Chinese fashion industry practitioners. This is because the lack of fashion design innovation, workers comprehensive ability, education and training system, and corporate social responsibility are the most important weaknesses for Chinese fashion companies. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the Jewish business tradition and characteristics, deeply understand their business concepts and behavior, and use their essence to provide insights for Chinese fashion business practitioners to improve the above weaknesses.

Using Rich Lists to Study the Super-Rich and Top Wealth Inequality: Insights from Switzerland

Abstract We present a new data set we built based on Swiss rich lists going back to 1989. We show, among other things, that 60% of the super-rich are heirs—a fraction twice as large as in the US—and that wealth mobility at the very top has declined significantly. We find that top 0.01% wealth shares are higher than previous estimates based on wealth tax statistics suggest. At the same time, we argue that rich list data lead to overestimating wealth inequality. While rich lists are valuable to study the super-rich, we recommend to use reported wealth figures with caution.

CHASING THE TAIL: A GENERALIZED PARETO DISTRIBUTION APPROACH TO ESTIMATING WEALTH INEQUALITY

AbstractSince the work reported in Vermeulen (Review of Income and Wealth, 64(2), 357–387; 2018), a literature has developed using the simple Pareto distribution along with “rich list” information to improve estimates of the upper tail of the wealth distribution measured in surveys. Because the construction of such external data is typically opaque and subject to error, it may be best not to depend exclusively on this approach. This paper develops an alternative approach, using the generalized Pareto distribution (GPD), extending an estimation strategy developed by Castillo and Hadi (Journal of the American Statistical Association, 92(440), 1609–1620; 1997) in a novel way to survey data. The extension allows for addressing imperfections in the effective coverage of the upper tail of the wealth distribution, as well as allowing the imposition of an external measure of aggregate wealth as a constraint. The paper implements the method on Austrian survey data that has weak coverage of wealthy households. The results indicate that even with a range of plausible adjustments for data imperfections, relying only on the survey data to project the upper tail is insufficient to yield implied wealth aggregates in the range implied by aggregate figures. Imposing the implied aggregate as a constraint is necessary. The approach may be particularly useful in comparing survey‐based inequality measures across and within countries and over time, as well as in constructing distributional financial accounts.

Power-law Behaviour and Inequality in the Upper Tail of Wealth, Income and Consumption: Evidence from India

This article analyses the upper tails of wealth, income and consumption in India over the period 2012–2018 using rich lists, wealth surveys, income tax returns and consumer expenditure surveys. We find the upper tail to obey a power-law in all three economic resources. Comparing our estimates in 2012—where we possess data on wealth, income and consumption simultaneously—we find that the upper tail of wealth is most concentrated, income slightly less, and consumption is much less concentrated. Unlike wealth and income, the Pareto coefficients for consumption are estimated to have a well-defined mean and variance. Our findings are suggestive of convex saving functions in the income distribution. JEL Codes: D31, O16, O53

Using Rich Lists to Study the Super-Rich and Top Wealth Inequality: Insights from Switzerland

Using Rich Lists to Study the Super-Rich and Top Wealth Inequality: Insights from Switzerland

Preparation of Rich Lists of Research Gaps in the Specific Sentiment Analysis Tasks of Code-mixed Indian Languages

Preparation of Rich Lists of Research Gaps in the Specific Sentiment Analysis Tasks of Code-mixed Indian Languages

"Money makes the rooms go round": effects of affluence on room size and functions in 1890s houses

The 1890s was a decade in which a number of very large houses were either built or added to throughout the country. Their owners were commonly wealthy landowners or skilled businessmen. Room numbers and functions reflected the Victorian lifestyles of such people and tended to reflect similar trends in England although on a somewhat lesser scale. Room numbers of between 20 and 50 contrasted sharply with the four to eight rooms in an average family home of the time. In the latter the rooms were largely functional with the main family life centred around the kitchen and bedrooms. The big houses by contrast had extra rooms such as servants' quarters, ballrooms, billiard rooms, libraries, and dressing rooms and were often designed for entertaining and catering for visiting parties. The economic problems of the late 1880s and early '90s seem to have had little effect on those who might have been regarded as being on "The Rich List" whereas those on low incomes would not have been able to add more rooms such as parlours and bathrooms which became more common as conditions improved.

The Sky and the Stratosphere: Wealth Concentration in India During the Last (Lost) Decade

AbstractThis paper provides new and improved estimates of wealth concentration in India during 2012–2018. Official surveys show a decline in wealth inequality and mean wealth per adult for the first time in three decades. We argue that although these wealth surveys are meant to be nationally representative, they underestimate the upper tail of the Indian wealth distribution—top wealth levels appear orders of magnitudes below externally measured estimates and unrepresentative of increasing stock‐market participation over this period. By combining official surveys and rich lists, we provide new estimates of top wealth shares and total personal wealth in India. We find that personal wealth is underestimated by nearly 54 percent in official data, and this gap increased sharply during the 2010s. Our revised estimates show wealth concentration to have sharply increased during 2012–2018. The share of India's top 1 percent is higher than similar estimates for Asia, and second only to Russia.

Improving internal control quality as a corporate response to the Forbes Rich List

This study takes advantage of the Forbes Rich List as an external shock to examine its effect on internal control quality in mainland China. Using the difference-in-differences (DiD) method for a large sample of 17,910 firm-year observations from 2000 to 2014, we find that firms controlled by entrepreneurs included in the Forbes Rich List tend to have higher internal control quality than firms not controlled by entrepreneurs in the list. The listed entrepreneurs improve their firms’ internal control quality by means of reducing the information asymmetry between the firms and outsiders. Further tests show that the event effect is more pronounced when firms have higher misreporting costs and when listed entrepreneurs hold chairman positions than in other situations. Our results remain robust after applying the propensity score matching method, stacked DiD estimation, and an alternative measure of internal control quality. These findings enrich the literature on the effect of the Rich List and the determinants of internal control quality in emerging markets.

Estimating the Distribution of Household Wealth: Methods for Adjusting Survey Data Estimates Using National Accounts and Rich List Data

Income and wealth surveys are usually affected by unit non‐response and reporting errors, which contribute to a mismatch with macroeconomic figures from national accounts. In this paper, we develop a novel allocation method to address these two issues simultaneously, when only limited external information is available. The proposed approach combines information from a power law (Pareto) model with imputation procedures based on calibration. We apply the proposed simultaneous approach to produce distributional indicators for four Euro‐Area countries that are consistent with their national accounts. In particular, we use data from the 2014 Finnish, French, German, and Italian Household Finance and Consumption Survey and rich list data from Forbes or national press sources, along with household sector aggregates from national accounts, as auxiliary sources of information. A bootstrap procedure is also applied to evaluate the precision of the final estimates.

Clustering in Bitcoin balance

This study investigates clustering in Bitcoin wallet balances by examining the Bitcoin rich list. We discover significant clustering in both integer and fractional parts of balances, particularly at 00. Using probit models, we find that wallet age, number of transactions, and balance significantly impact clustering, with balance being the most influential factor. Our findings suggest that economic and behavioral factors may drive Bitcoin wallet holders’ preferences, contributing to the observed clustering. This study offers valuable insights into the behavior of Bitcoin users and sets the stage for further investigation in this area.

Public attention and analyst visits: Evidence from China

This paper investigates the impact of public attention on analyst visits. To establish causality, we use Hurun Rich List as an exogenous shock to identify the impact of public attention. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find that public attention significantly enhances the number of analyst visits. This effect is more pronounced among firms with complex information environments and higher future uncertainty. Our findings indicate that public attention affects analyst visits through influencing investor demand for analyst services. Further analysis reveals that analyst visits improve the accuracy of analysts' forecasts. We also find that the rich listing events indirectly leads to policy changes or the introduction of new policies. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of public attention to the firms' information environment.

Top Wealth and Its Historical Origins: Identifying Entrenched Fortunes by Linking Rich Lists over 100 Years

The authors examine the historical origins of Germany’s 1,032 largest fortunes. The innovation of this research is to link a rich list from 2019 with rich lists from 1913 and genealogical data provided in Wikidata. The authors find a remarkable historical continuity of large fortunes despite two world wars, the Great Depression, regime changes, and different currency reforms. One third of the companies associated with today’s largest fortunes were founded before World War I. About 8 percent of today’s fortunes can be traced back to fortunes on rich lists from 1913. Regression analyses show that these entrenched fortunes rank on average higher on the rich list than fortunes of younger origin. Network analyses indicate that some of today’s largest fortunes are intertwined through marital lines, hinting at social closure at the top. These findings indicate that the accumulation and perpetuation of fortunes over many generations is an important feature of top wealth in Germany.

A Harmonized Net Wealth Tax in the European Union

AbstractWhile taxes on wealth for a long time played only a marginal role in the public finance and taxation literature, the increase of wealth inequality and concentration in many EU countries has spurred new interest in wealth taxation. At the same time, recurrent net wealth taxes have almost completely disappeared in Europe, inter alia due to fears of asset and taxpayer migration. The paper provides estimates of the revenue that could be raised from an EU-wide net wealth tax enabling the containment of migration responses, using data from the Household, Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). To account for differential non-response, we augment the HFCS with data from the Forbes rich list as well as national rich lists and replace the top tail of the wealth distribution according to the HFCS by an estimated Pareto distributed top tail. To account for under-reporting we scale aggregate financial assets in the HFCS to match their counterparts outlined in the National Accounts. We estimate that a moderately progressive net wealth tax levied at a rate of 1% on net wealth between € 1 and € 5 million, and 1.5% on wealth above € 5 million, could raise between € 165 and € 177 billion after accounting for avoidance and evasion responses. Such an EU harmonized net wealth tax would affect only a small fraction of households, ranging between 0.41% in Latvia and 8.65% in Belgium.

Political connections and the super-rich in Poland

• There is little evidence that the Polish economy suffers from crony capitalism. • We use newly collected original panel data from 2002 to 2018. • Political connections do not increase chances of upward mobility on the rich list. • Political connections are not consistently related to the size of the largest fortunes. • They help not to move down on the list, but they increase the risk of dropping out. We study the impact of political connections of the richest Poles on their wealth level, mobility among the rich, and the risk of dropping off the rich list. We use newly collected original panel data (2002–2018) and we find that none of the variables capturing political connections of Polish multimillionaires is consistently related neither to the size of the largest fortunes in Poland nor to the chances of upward mobility on the rich list. While we find that political connections are related to a lower probability of moving down on the rich list, we also obtain that they increase the risk of falling off the list. Our results show that, contrary to some other post-socialist countries such as Russia or Ukraine, there is little evidence that the Polish economy suffers from crony capitalism.

A study of UK household wealth through empirical analysis and a non-linear Kesten process.

We study the wealth distribution of UK households through a detailed analysis of data from wealth surveys and rich lists, and propose a non-linear Kesten process to model the dynamics of household wealth. The main features of our model are that we focus on wealth growth and disregard exchange, and that the rate of return on wealth is increasing with wealth. The linear case with wealth-independent return rate has been well studied, leading to a log-normal wealth distribution in the long time limit which is essentially independent of initial conditions. We find through theoretical analysis and simulations that the non-linearity in our model leads to more realistic power-law tails, and can explain an apparent two-tailed structure in the empirical wealth distribution of the UK and other countries. Other realistic features of our model include an increase in inequality over time, and a stronger dependence on initial conditions compared to linear models.

The benevolence of the billionaires: Evidence from China's Hurun rich list

This study investigates whether and how the public pressure on entrepreneurs' wealth shapes corporate donations in the context of China. Using a sample in 2010–2019 and a general difference-in-difference approach, we find that debuted entrepreneurs will increase corporate donations. This is robust to different samples and estimation approach. We also demonstrate the mediating effect of media coverage and find the impact is augmented when firms are located in areas with a poor institutional environment or less information transparency. This article explains the impact of the public pressure on corporate decision-making from the perspective of the disclosure of entrepreneurs’ wealth.

Public attention and executive perks: Evidence from China

This paper investigates the impact of public attention on executive perks. To establish causality, we exploit an exogenous shock in public attention measured by whether the actual controller of the firm appeared on the Rich List in China. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find that firms with their actual controller on the Rich List generate fewer executive perks than those that are not influenced by the event. Our findings also demonstrate that external information environments and corporate governance can serve as the economic mechanisms. With the increase of public attention, the information asymmetry is reduced and the corporate governance is improved, thus discouraging the executive perks.

A one-off wealth tax for Belgium: Revenue potential, distributional impact, and environmental effects

Policymakers and economists are becoming increasingly concerned about wealth inequality. Here we estimate Belgium's wealth distribution — and based on this distribution — the revenue potential, distributional impact, and environmental effect of three proposals for a one-off Belgian wealth tax. Our method consists of (1) estimating the Belgian wealth distribution by extending survey data with a top-tail Pareto distribution based on a novel national rich list, and (2) combining the estimated wealth distribution with proposed tax configurations and published elasticities. There are four main results. First, the wealthiest 1% of households possess ~24% of total net wealth, substantially more than previous estimates suggest. Second, the revenue potential of a one-off tax is considerably higher than estimated by wealth tax advocates. Third, the distributional impact would be limited as the richest 1% of households would still possess at least 23% of total net wealth. Fourth, a one-off tax would likely reduce CO2 emissions by only 0.1–0.6%. Overall, our findings suggest a one-off wealth tax could finance over half of Belgium's COVID-19 costs, but would lead to only small reductions in wealth inequality and environmental impact. Ecological economists may therefore wish to pursue other policy proposals to achieve fair distribution and sustainable scale.

Missing the wealthy in the HFCS: micro problems with macro implications

Wealth aggregates implied by the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) usually yield much lower amounts than macroeconomic statistics reported in the National Accounts. An important source of this gap may be the under-representation of the wealthiest households in the HFCS. This article therefore combines a semi-parametric Pareto model estimated from top survey data and observations from rich lists with a non-parametric stratification approach to quantify the impact of the missing wealthy households on component-specific micro-macro gaps. We find that unadjusted micro data substantially underestimates wealth inequality. The largest effects are documented for equity. For other components, the missing wealthy explain less than ten percentage points of the micro-macro gap. We find that differences in oversampling strategies limit the cross-country comparability of unadjusted survey-implied wealth distributions and that our top tail adjustment leads to measures that are internationally better comparable.