The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015

This work is part of a larger project kindly supported by research grants from the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) and the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). We are indebted to a large number of researchers who helped with data on individual countries. We are especially grateful to Francisco Amaral for outstanding research assistance, and would also like to thank Felix Rhiel, Mario Richarz, Thomas Schwarz, Lucie Stoppok, and Yevhenii Usenko for research assistance on large parts of the project. For their helpful comments we thank the editors and referees, along with Roger Farmer, John Fernald, Philipp Hofflin, David Le Bris, Clara Martínez-Toledano, Emi Nakamura, Thomas Piketty, Matthew Rognlie, Jón Steinsson, Johannes Stroebel, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh. We likewise thank conference participants at the NBER Summer Institute EFG Program Meeting, the Brevan Howard Centre for Financial Analysis at Imperial College Business School, the CEPR Housing Conference, and CEPR ESSIM at the Norges Bank, as well as seminar participants at Banca d’Italia, the Bank of England, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Cornell University, New York University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, UC Berkeley, UCLA Anderson, Research Center SAFE, SciencesPo, and the Paris School of Economics. All errors are our own. The views expressed herein are solely the responsibility of the authors and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Deutsche Bundesbank, or the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• online appendix

• December 14, 2017