Since World War II, direct stock ownership by households has largely been replaced by indirect stock ownership by financial institutions. We argue that tax policy is the driving force. Using long time-series from eight countries, we show that the fraction of household ownership decreases with...

We analyze general equilibrium relationships between trade policy and the household distribution of income, decomposing social welfare into real income level and variance components through Gini and Atkinson indexes. We embed these inequality-adjusted social welfare functions in a general...

The paper presents the main results of the Eurosystem's Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) with an emphasis on the data for Italy in the international context. The paper examines households' socio-demographic characteristics, assets and income distribution, participation in real and...

We study the distribution of housing wealth in Italy using data from a sample survey (the survey on household income and wealth) and from administrative records regarding real estate owners held by the Italian Department of the Treasury. Our results show that owners with either a low or a high...

The financial and economic crisis that have shaken many countries in the last years have increased demand for timely, coherent and consistent distributional information for the household sector. In the Euro area, most of the national central banks collect such information through income and...

This paper quantifies the extent of heterogeneity in consumption responses to changes in real interest rates and house prices in the four largest economies in the euro area: France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. We first calibrate a life-cycle incomplete-markets model with a financial asset and...

This article examines the rate at which different households go green and how this affects the distribution of both wealth and CO2 benefits. Using a unique dataset from the Netherlands, we find that lower-income households are less likely to make their homes more energy efficient. At the same...

In this paper, we document that households' consumption expenditures crucially depend on their expected earnings - even after controlling for realized earnings, wealth and time-invariant unobserved characteristics such as permanent income and over-confidence. To explain this evidence, we develop...

In this paper, we document that households' consumption expenditures depend on their expected earnings - even after controlling for realized earnings and wealth. To explain this evidence, we develop and structurally estimate a standard-incomplete markets model in which rational households...