What are the main components of the GC Wealth Project website?
The GC Wealth Project website — first launched in May 2023 — offers 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 website is organized around two main components. One is a “data warehouse,” which contains a large collection of data, organized into multiple databases, that can be visualized in many ways through an interactive “dashboard.” The other is a “Digital Library of Research on Wealth Inequality.” Both are designed to provide researchers, policymakers, journalists, and others interested in wealth and wealth taxation with open and unlimited access to an array of high quality information and resources.
All of the data, including the tailored visualizations that users can create using the interactive dashboard, can be exported.
What are the main components of the GC Wealth Project Data Warehouse?
The data warehouse includes four databases, which correspond to the four sections of the dashboard:
- Wealth Topography
- Wealth Inequality Trends
- Estate, Inheritance, and Gift Taxes
- Inheritance Trends: coming soon
To create and populate the sections of our data warehouse, we drew on a large array of data sources. The sections were filled by assembling secondary sources, extracting policy data, and/or querying and working directly with primary microdatasets.
The sources are all listed in our Data Sources Library.
The data warehouse is also complemented with full metadata descriptive information. The metadata provide detailed information on sources of data, longer descriptions of variables and the concepts used, procedures of aggregation and estimation, bibliography links, and complementary information.
All the code we wrote to scrape, clean, process, and analyze the data is available in a GitHub repository. This allows for transparency and reproducibility of the results, and provides a resource for researchers interested in replicating or extending our work.
What are the sources of your data?
To create and populate the sections of our data warehouse, we drew on a large array of data sources. The sections were filled by assembling secondary sources, extracting policy data, and/or querying and working directly with primary microdatasets.
The original data came from:
- Several well-known and widely used databases and reports — e.g., the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS) Database, the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), the World Inequality Database (WID), and Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Databook
- Many country-specific national statistical offices and central banks
- A large number of research papers
The sources are all listed in our Data Sources Library.
These sources can be broadly classified as follows:
| Cross-national official statistics | Cross-national data from official institutions, such as national accounts from central banks. |
| Cross-national official survey data | Cross-national survey data from official institutions, such as household finance surveys from national statistical offices. |
| Cross-national corporate research | Cross-national research published by corporate entities, such as private consultancy firms. |
| Cross-national academic research | Cross-national research published by academic institutions, such as an academic journal article. |
| Cross-national government research | Cross-national research published by government institutions, such as government-commissioned reports. |
| Official statistics | Data from official institutions, such as national accounts from a country’s central bank. |
| Official survey data | Survey data from official institutions, such as household finance surveys from a country’s national statistical office. |
| Corporate research | Research published by corporate entities, such as private consultancy firms. |
| Academic research | Research published by academic institutions, such as an academic journal article. |
| Government research | Research published by government institutions, such as government-commissioned reports. |
| Government legislation | The actual text of public legislation. |
| Government legislative info | Texts published by government institutions that provide descriptive information about public legislation, such as a government website explaining tax clauses. |
| Government documents | Other texts published by government institutions, such as tax documents, forms, or descriptive reports. |
May I use your data and/or reproduce your visualizations for my own work?
Yes.
Much of the quantitative and policy data that we utilize came from original sources — databases, reports, and/or papers — whose usage is unrestricted. In some cases, we accessed restricted microdata. However, under no circumstances do we provide access to those microdata; we present only aggregates, estimated/created by our team, based on those restricted data.
You are free to use our data and/or reproduce our visualizations. What is important is how you cite the work.
How should I cite data from the GC Wealth Project?
If you are using more than one database from the warehouse in your work, the proper way to cite is as follows:
GC Wealth Project Data, [year], accessed via http://wealthproject.gc.cuny.edu, on [date].
If you are only using one specific database from our data warehouse, the proper way to cite the database is as follows:
GC Wealth Project Data - Wealth Inequality Trends Database, [year], accessed via http://wealthproject.gc.cuny.edu, on [date].
GC Wealth Project Data - Wealth Topography Database, [year], accessed via http://wealthproject.gc.cuny.edu, on [date].
GC Wealth Project Data - Estate, Inheritance, and Gifts Taxation Database, [year], accessed via http://wealthproject.gc.cuny.edu, on [date].
Please include the citation in your bibliography: If you use GC Wealth Project data in a report, monograph, paper, book, book chapter, journal article, dissertation, etc., include the citation in your bibliography, alphabetized under “G.”
How should I cite a visualization from your website?
If you are simply using a visualization downloaded directly from the website, the proper way to cite our work is as follows:
GC Wealth Project Data, [year], visualization retrieved from http://wealthproject.gc.cuny.edu, accessed on [date].
Example:
GC Wealth Project Data, 2023, visualization retrieved from http://wealthproject.gc.cuny.edu, accessed on August 15, 2023.
If you create a visualization that utilizes a single source, please include that source in your citation. For example, if you build a graph using our estimates based on microdata from the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS) Database, include that in your citation:
GC Wealth Project Data, [year], visualization retrieved from http://wealthproject.gc.cuny.edu, on [date]. Estimates based on Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS) Database.
Please include the citation in your bibliography: If you use GC Wealth Project data in a report, monograph, paper, book, book chapter, journal article, dissertation, etc., include the citation in your bibliography, alphabetized under “G.”
What are you working on and what will be added later?
The initial launch of the GC Wealth Project presents our data warehouse, divided into three sections: Wealth Topography; Wealth Inequality Trends; and Estate, Inheritance, and Gift (“EIG”) Taxes. Later in 2023, we will launch two major additions. One, we will add information on EIG taxes as they operate across the U.S. states. Two, we will add a fourth section on Inheritance Trends; this section will present cross-country estimates of annual flows of wealth left at death as well as gifts from living donors. The included estimates will be taken from existing works in the literature or derived using a variety of approaches drawing on national accounts data and survey data, as well as estate, inheritance, and gifts tax records.
How can I stay updated with your latest work?
The best ways to stays in touch are to:
- Visit the GC Wealth Project website regularly
- Visit the website of the GC Stone Center — the GC Wealth Project’s parent institution — regularly
- Follow the Stone Center on Twitter:
How may I contact your team if I have questions and/or want to report what I think is an error?
Email us at wealthdata@gc.cuny.edu.
How may I suggest publications to be added to the Digital Library of Research on Wealth Inequality?
The Digital Library of Research on Wealth Inequality is a work in progress and is being updated regularly. Please direct us to academic publications that we have missed; to do that, use this form.