a clash between “ winning ” borrowers and “ losing ” savers. this representation is simplistic because it ignores the various other channels through which monetary policy affects household wealth, including its indirect impact on incomes and employment. in fact, new approaches to modelling and analysing household heterogeneity have recently stressed the importance of these indirect channels of monetary transmission, which operate through the responses of higher wages and employment to monetary easing. 3 a key quantitative finding of that literature is that this indirect income channel disproportionately stimulates incomes and consumption in the lower part of the distribution. in line with this work, internal ecb research finds that low short rates do hurt “ savers ”, i. e., households owning non negligible amounts of liquid assets, via a direct effect — that is, via the reduction in their income from those assets. low short rates, however, also benefit savers, like all other households, via an indirect effect — that is, the reduction in their unemployment rate and the increase in their labour income. the indirect effect dominates from a quantitative perspective. in addition, through the reduction of the unemployment rate of poorer households, the indirect effect reduced income inequality. on the whole, these results support the finding that monetary policy in recent years benefited most households and did not contribute to an increase in wealth, income or consumption inequality. 4 this debate illustrates that we need increasingly precise ways to measure wealth in order to foster a more informed public debate about the effects of various policies and other factors on the distribution of wealth. as you may know, the eurosystem has for many years contributed to the measurement and analysis of the wealth distribution and its components across countries by collecting and providing the household finance and consumption survey micro data. my overview of gabriel ’ s work has been quite selective, focusing on topics related to the measurement and determinants of inequality in household wealth, but gabriel has also worked on an impressive range of other areas, such as the substitution between illegal tax evasion and legal tax avoidance, effects of wealth taxes on household saving and the role of tax havens and tax competition in profit - shifting by large multinational firms. dedicated research to measure inequality around the globe and the analysis of its root causes is an established priority among major institutions. this is an important development. we should however not lose focus. despite impressive progress in combating poverty over the past decades, poverty persists at unacceptable levels. that ’ s why, in

luis de guindos : gabriel zucman ’ s contribution to research on wealth inequality and the redistributive effects on globalization remarks by luis de guindos, vice - president of the european central bank, on the occasion of the award of the bernacer prize to professor gabriel zucman, madrid, 11 october 2019. * * * it is a pleasure for me to celebrate with you the award of the 2019 bernacer prize to gabriel zucman, assistant professor of economics at the university of california, berkeley. gabriel ’ s creative work on measuring household wealth over time and across countries and his studies on the effects of taxation and globalisation on the accumulation of wealth have become increasingly influential among academic economists and policymakers. he is a deserved recipient of the bernacer prize, which is awarded each year to an outstanding young european economist working in the fields of macroeconomics and finance. this year ’ s prize has been awarded specifically for gabriel ’ s “ influential research on wealth inequality and the redistributive effects of globalisation ”. gabriel, together with his co - authors thomas piketty and emmanuel saez, has been one of the pioneers in this field, showing us how to use various data sources – aggregate sectoral accounts, household surveys, fiscal data, historical administrative data and unofficial records – to estimate the evolution and determinants of the wealth distribution over centuries. such a long time range is important, as many of the movements in wealth inequality are very gradual, which means that these changes can only be estimated reliably once enough data are available. at the same time, retrieving historical information on wealth poses multiple challenges. first, data on household wealth are much scarcer than, say, data on household income. second, the wealth distribution is heavily skewed toward its top tail, such that relatively few households hold a large fraction of aggregate wealth in the economy. consequently, to be able to measure wealth inequality, it is important that we include information about the very richest households. third, and especially for the richest households, one should account for all assets, including those held abroad, which tend to be more difficult to trace. a key approach used by gabriel to overcome these challenges is the “ income capitalisation method ”, which uses fiscal data on capital income to estimate the wealth distribution. although not always easily accessible, fiscal data are available for several decades and also cover the richest households. the method is therefore useful in