EQUALITAS researcher Pedro Salas-Rojo and co-authors (Carlos J. Gil-Hernández, Guillem Vidal-Lorda and Davide Villani) have won the Aldi Hagenaars Memorial Award for their paper “Wealth inequality and stratification by social classes in 21st-century Europe.” 

The paper analyses the relationship between social classes and wealth inequality in comparison to income. Using data from the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS) for five European countries (Finland, Germany, Greece, Spain, and Slovakia) from 2002 to 2018, the authors document that wealth is particularly concentrated among the upper classes, exceeding their population shares. In contrast, the lower classes hold a smaller share of wealth than their population share, with these disparities increasing over time. 

Wealth composition also differs between social classes: the upper and middle classes hold more profitable and liquid assets (such as stocks and savings), while the working classes rely primarily on their main residences. The authors also show that the wealth-to-income ratio is higher for the upper classes than for the lower classes, revealing that working-class households have less wealth to cope against unforeseen income shocks. Finally, the authors demonstrate that broad occupational classes account for 50% of the reported Gini coefficient, and that these categories capture disparities in income more effectively than in wealth.

The paper has been published in Social Indicators Research: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-025-03532-x