Wealth and Mobility Study (WAM)

Wealth inequality has profound and lasting impacts on both economic security and the opportunities of the next generation. Although it is well established that the United States exhibits the highest level of wealth inequality among developed countries, our ability to understand how wealth is distributed geographically and transmitted across generations has been severely hindered by the limitations of the existing data infrastructure.

To address this critical gap, the Wealth and Mobility Study (WAM) was launched in 2021.
Drawing on population tax records from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and other large-scale administrative data, WAM constructs detailed measures of wealth and income for all U.S. individuals and links them across generations. Using these data, WAM produces new estimates of wealth and income levels, inequality, segregation, and mobility—both nationally and across a wide range of subnational geographies.

By building this new public data infrastructure, WAM enables a broad range of novel analyses and insights into wealth and income inequality and intergenerational mobility in the United States. Among the urgent questions these data can help answer are:

• How do wealth and income vary within and across states, counties, and communities?
• How unequal are the opportunities to attain wealth and income?
• Which areas of the country offer greater or more limited economic opportunity?

WAM is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.