This paper focuses on one of the factors that have been put forward in the literature within the
secular stagnation view: Rising inequality. In a two-step procedure, this research first applies
the Laubach and Williams (2003) methodology to jointly estimate the natural rate of interest
(NRI), potential output and its growth rate for the G7 and we find that the NRI has been
decreasing in all countries, which is in accordance with the secular stagnation hypothesis. In a
second step, a fixed effects regression for a panel of 7 countries is used to estimate the effect
of inequality on the natural rate of interest from 1980 to 2016. We find evidence that rising
inequality has contributed to the decline of the time-varying natural rate of interest
