Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/230067 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Citation: 
[Journal:] Review of Income and Wealth [ISSN:] 1475-4991 [Volume:] 66 [Issue:] 4 [Publisher:] Wiley [Place:] Hoboken, NJ [Year:] 2020 [Pages:] 825-849
Publisher: 
Wiley, Hoboken, NJ
Abstract: 
High-wealth individuals are typically underrepresented or completely missing in population surveys. The lack of comprehensive national registers on high-wealth individuals in many countries challenged previous attempts to remedy this under-representation. In a novel research design, we draw on public data on the shareholding structures of companies as a sampling frame. Our design builds on the empirical regularity that high-wealth individuals are likely to hold at least part of their assets in the form of shareholdings. Based on data from over 270 million companies worldwide, we select all individuals who are both German residents and registered shareholders of companies. In a pretest, we interviewed 124 households from a gross sample of 2,000 anchor persons. Our analysis shows that values of shareholdings from register data highly correlate with individual ranks in the wealth distribution, that the quality of personal information, particularly the residential address, is sufficiently high for subsequent interviewing, and that the approach can fill a major data and research gap in the study of high-wealth individuals.
Subjects: 
sampling method
wealth
top wealth
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

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