Research

Despite the recent findings on the inequality-increasing effect of homogeneous marriages, the growing body of literature on ‘the super-rich’, has missed out on illuminating contemporary global wealth inequality levels from a marital choice perspective. Not much is known about family formation at the top of the wealth distribution. By combining Forbes billionaires rich list data and billionaires’ Wikipedia articles with qualitative data, the paper presents a unique dataset capturing all US American billionaires (n = 948) and their spouses. The results suggest deeply ingrained traditional role allocations in billionaire couples. Female billionaires appear to be more likely to have a partner in the same upper-class fraction than male billionaires, who appear to be more liberal regarding their spouses’ class positions. By shedding light on the unique marriage demographics of the super-rich, the paper supports the importance of dynasty-making family strategies and social closure for understanding the economic elites of our times.

With unprecedented urbanization, 19th-century European cities faced the “housing question”, i.e. precarious housing standards and affordability problems. While existing research has well described these historical housing problems in single-city studies or in national urbanization histories, there is, to our knowledge, hardly any multi-country neighborhood-level comparison across many cities. This paper first draws on a new data collection of extensive statistical surveys of 353 cities’ housing conditions across their 4363 neighborhoods around the median year 1906 in 24 countries and combines them with newly georeferenced historical maps. We show that the historical housing question was characterized by extremely high densities, private tenancy, rents and segregation levels, particularly for large and poor households in the substandard, small overcrowded flats in larger, densely built neighborhoods, particularly in larger North- and Eastern-European cities. Our snapshot comparison with current housing conditions additionally shows that despite lower densities and rent segregation as well as higher quality and homeownership, the rental burden and building-structure inequality across neighborhoods has rather increased, suggesting a housing-question comeback under different guises.