000			01824nam a22001457a 4500
999			_c525050 _d525050
008			240208b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
100			_aDerenoncourt, E. et al _948440
245			_aChanges in the distribution of black and white wealth since the US civil war
260			_aThe Journal of Economic Perspectives
300			_a37(4), Full, 2023: p.71-90
520			_aThe difference in the average wealth of Black and white Americans narrowed in the first century after the Civil War, but remained large and even widened again after 1980. Given high levels of wealth concentration both historically and today, dynamics at the average may not capture important heterogeneity in racial wealth gaps across the distribution. This paper looks into the historical evolution of the Black and white wealth distributions since Emancipation. The picture that emerges is an even starker one than racial wealth inequality at the mean. Tracing, for the first time, the evolution of wealth of the median Black household and the gap between the typical Black and white household over time, we estimate that the majority of Black households only began to dispose of measurable wealth around World War II. While the civil rights era brought substantial wealth gains for the median Black household, the gap between Black and white wealth at the median has not changed much since the 1970s. The top and the bottom of the wealth distribution show even greater persistence, with Black households consistently over-represented in the bottom half of the wealth distribution and under-represented in the top-10 percent over the past seven decades.- Reproduced https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.37.4.71
773			_aThe Journal of Economic Perspectives
906			_aPOLITICS AND GOVERNMENT – UNITED STATES
942			_cAR