About
Severin Rapp is a Research Officer at LSE’s International Inequalities Institute, working on inequality, economic policy, and the financial wellbeing of households and individuals. His current research focuses on savings behaviour and the measurement of private wealth (inequality). Moreover, he is interested in studying perceptions of wealth inequality and policies to address it.
Severin holds a PhD from the Vienna University of Economics and Business and previously held positions at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the CUNY Graduate Center and at the OECD. He is also affiliated with the Research Institute Economics of Inequality at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.
Much of Severin's work centres on savings behaviour and the factors shaping wealth accumulation and distribution. He is also interested in the measurement of private wealth, including work unearthing new administrative data on inheritances and wealth inequality. He is a contributor to the GC Wealth Project, a large cross-national data infrastructure on private wealth. In a recent project, he studies how people's perceptions of wealth inequality diverge from inequality as measured by traditional survey instruments. Another ongoing project studies deliberative democracy and views on wealth redistribution and -taxation.
Recent work has been published in peer-reviewed, internationally recognised outlets including the Review of Income and Wealth and Scientific Data (Nature).