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The information from estates (the net value of real and financial property of a deceased person) has commonly served as the basis for the estimation of the distribution of wealth among the living via the mortality multiplier method since the works by Mallet (1908) and Mallet and Strutt (1915) for the United Kingdom. The principle of the method is very basic, even if a number of important conceptual challenges are involved: the set of deceased people are taken as a sample of the living, and each estate is expanded by a multiplier (weight) equal to the inverse probability of death. Death, however, does not randomly sample the population. Older individuals, as well as males and people from poorer backgrounds, have, other things being equal, higher mortality risk. Differential mortality multipliers should be used to transform the estate data into estimates of wealth-