IMPORTANCE Examining causes of death and making comparisons across countries may increase understanding of the income-related differences in life expectancy. OBJECTIVES To describe income-related differences in life expectancy and causes of death in Norway and to compare those differences with US estimates. DESIGN AND SETTING A registry-based study including all Norwegian residents aged at least 40 years from 2005 to 2015. EXPOSURES Household income adjusted for household size. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Life expectancy at 40 years of age and cause-specific mortality. RESULTS In total, 3 041 828 persons contributed 25 805 277 person-years and 441 768 deaths during the study period (mean [SD] age, 59.3 years [13.6]; mean [SD] number of household members per person, 2.5 [1.3]). Life expectancy was highest for women with income in the top 1% (86.4 years [95% CI, 85.7-87.1]) which was 8.4 years (95% CI, 7.2-9.6) longer than women with income in the lowest 1%. Men with the lowest 1% income had the lowest life expectancy (70.6 years [95% CI, 69.6-71.6]), which was 13.8 years (95% CI, 12.3-15.2) less than men with the top 1% income. From 2005 to 2015, the differences in life expectancy by income increased, largely attributable to deaths from cardiovascular disease, cancers, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and dementia in older age groups and substance use deaths and suicides in younger age groups. Over the same period, life expectancy for women in the highest income quartile increased 3.2 years (95% CI, 2.7-3.7), while life expectancy for women in the lowest income quartile decreased 0.4 years (95% CI, −1.0 to 0.2). For men, life expectancy increased 3.1 years (95% CI, 2.5-3.7) in the highest income quartile and 0.9 years (95% CI, 0.2-1.6) in the lowest income quartile. Differences in life expectancy by income levels in Norway were similar to differences observed in the United States, except that life expectancy was higher in Norway in the lower to middle part of the income distribution in both men and women. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In Norway, there were substantial and increasing gaps in life expectancy by income level from 2005 to 2015. The largest differences in life expectancy between Norway and United States were for individuals in the lower to middle part of the income distribution.

There are large differences in intergenerational mobility between countries. Little is known, however, about how persistent such differences are, and how they evolve over time. This paper constructs a data set of 835 537 linked father-son pairs from census records and documents a substantial increase in intergenerational occupational mobility in Norway between 1865 and 2011. The increase is most pronounced in non-farm occupations. The findings show that long-run mobility developments previously described for the US and UK are not necessarily representative for other countries, and that high mobility in a given country today need not reflect high mobility before industrialization.

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This paper presents a new method for calculating Gini coefficients from tabulations of the mean income of social classes. Income distribution data from before the Industrial Revolution usually come in the form of such tabulations, called social tables. Inequality indices generated from social tables are frequently calculated without adjusting for within-group income dispersion, leading to a systematic downward bias in the reporting of preindustrial inequality. The correction method presented in this paper is applied to an existing collection of twenty-five social tables, from Rome in AD 1 to India in 1947. The corrections, using a variety of assumptions on within-group dispersion, lead to substantial increases in the Gini coefficients.

Most evidence on the long-run evolution of income inequality is restricted to top income shares. While this evidence is relevant and important for studying the concentration of economic power, it is incomplete as an informational basis for analysing inequality in the income distribution as a whole. This paper proposes a nonparametric approach for estimating inequality in the overall distribution of income on the basis of tabular data from different sources, some in a highly aggregated form. The proposed approach is applied to Norway, for which rich historical data exist. We find evidence of very high income inequality from the late nineteenth century until the eve of World War II, followed by a rapid equalization until the 1950s. Income inequality remained low during the post-war period but has increased steadily since the 1980s. Estimates of a measure of affluence demonstrate that overall inequality has largely been governed by changes in the top half of the distribution and in the ratio between the mean incomes of the lower and upper halves of the population.