Since World War II, direct stock ownership by households has largely been replaced by indirect stock ownership by financial institutions.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...

This paper reports preliminary findings from a Federal Reserve Bank of New York research program aimed at improving survey measures of inflation expectations. We find that seemingly small differences in how inflation is referred to in a survey can lead respondents to consider significantly...

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...

We investigate the pattern of educational assortative mating, its evolution over time, and its impact on household income inequality. To these ends, we use rich data from the United States and Norway over the period 1980-2007. We find evidence of positive assortative mating at all levels of...

In this paper, we analyse different measures of asset and income poverty using micro-data for 15 euro area countries from the 2010 Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). We are particularly interested in the way in which specific definitions of income and wealth poverty affect the...

The Panel on Household Finances (PHF) is a new panel survey on household finances and wealth in Germany conducted by the Deutsche Bundesbank. It covers the balance sheets, pension claims, savings, incomes and work histories of households, together with some information on consumption patterns,...

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...