Introduction

Research on Economic Inequality, Volume 22, Economic Well-Being and Inequality: Papers from the Fifth ECINEQ Meeting, is primarily a collection of papers presented at the July 2013 Bari, Italy meeting. As is typical with volumes in this series, the contributions range from senior scholars to emerging scholars in the field of income distribution and poverty studies.

Great interest for inequality researchers lies in the use of wealth data. The volume begins with three papers that employ wealth data. The first of these papers is by the leading U.S. wealth inequality scholar, Edward N. Wolff. Wolff’s paper focuses on the impact of the Great Recession on the distribution of U.S. household’s wealth and its components. While median U.S. wealth fell “by a staggering 47 percent …, black households much harder hit than whites” and Hispanics also suffered disproportionately as a high percentage of bought homes close to the housing cycle peak. Finally, Wolff reports that “young households also got pommelled by the Great Recession.”