The Stone Center at the Graduate Center, CUNY, has launched the GC Wealth Project website, the result of a multi-year effort aimed at expanding and consolidating access to the most up-to-date research and information on wealth, wealth inequalities, and wealth transfers and related tax policies — across countries and over time.
The GC Wealth Project website has two main components: a data warehouse of gathered and novel data that can be visualized in a variety of ways through the Interactive Dashboard, and a Digital Library of Research on Wealth Inequality. Both the dashboard and the library provide researchers, policymakers, journalists, and others interested in wealth and wealth taxation with open, unlimited access to an array of high-quality information and resources.
“Wealth, a vital determinant of household well-being, is fundamentally different from income, yet our understanding of wealth is much less developed. The GC Wealth Project aims to address this gap by curating, gathering, and standardizing new and existing evidence on wealth, wealth inequality, and wealth taxation. The creation of a single platform where researchers, policymakers, and others can easily access and analyze such data is crucial to refine our knowledge about extreme wealth concentration and how it may compound other socio-economic inequalities, reduce intergenerational mobility, and damage the democratic process,” says Salvatore Morelli, director of the GC Wealth Project.
The data available through the Interactive Dashboard are divided among four sections: Wealth Topography; Wealth Inequality Trends; Estate, Inheritance, and Gift Taxes; and a section on Inheritance Trends that is coming soon. All the data on the site, as well as tailored visualizations that users can create using the interactive dashboard, can be exported.
The Digital Library is a comprehensive database that includes abstracts and (when possible) full texts of important, innovative, and high-quality articles, chapters, and books focused on wealth inequality. The library is updated regularly and categorizes the included literature into eight subsections.
“The Stone Center’s core mission is to produce and enable research on the causes, nature, and consequences of socio-economic inequality, with a specific mandate to expand research on wealth concentration at the top,” says Janet Gornick, director of the Stone Center and professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. “For the last four years, the GC Wealth Project has been a crucial component of the Stone Center’s work. By launching the Wealth Project site, Salvatore Morelli and his team have greatly expanded the availability of data and research on wealth. We are extremely proud of the care that they have taken to document all of the data sources and concepts, in order to enhance access to a variety of estimates and to expand users’ options.”
The GC Wealth Project’s international team includes postdoctoral scholars, research assistants, and consultants, based primarily at the Graduate Center and at Roma Tre University.
For user support and technical questions about the GC Wealth Project, email wealthdata@gc.cuny.edu. For more information about the Stone Center, email stn_lis@gc.cuny.edu.
Read more about the GC Wealth Project: