Reduced form estimations of precautionary saving with respect to labor market risk have hitherto failed to consider that a decrease of say unemployment probability or an increase in unemployment insurance (UI) generosity affects saving not only by reducing the expected variance in earnings but...

This study presents a new database, the Swedish National Wealth Database (SNWD), which contains annual data on private, public and national wealth and sectoral saving rates in Sweden over the past two centuries. The paper reviews previous investigations of national wealth, compares their...

This article explores the aggregate effects of women's empowerment on intra- and intertemporal household choices within a Bewley-style heterogeneous agent framework to aggregate household level decisions into macroeconomic variables. Emphasis is placed on the role of attitudes towards risk and...

Using data of households approaching retirement in the U.S., I find that the Whites' median saving rates are 9 percentage points larger than the Mexican Americans' rates (ethnic gap) and than the African Americans' rates (racial gap). Two-thirds of each gap correspond to changes in asset prices...

In the USA, the share of household wealth held by the richest 1% increased from 23.5% in 1980 to 41.8% in 2012. This paper contributes to understanding the causes behind this increase. First, using an accounting decomposition, I show that more than half of the increase in the share of the top 1%...

Housing is the greatest asset held by most households, and it is an important determinant of their financing and consumption decisions. Despite the fact that measuring housing wealth is crucial for understanding households' economic behavior, this indicator is currently unavailable in Mexico due...

This paper employs a calibrated model of the US economy to analyze the boom and bust in house prices as well as the shifts in the distribution of wealth during the years around the Great Recession. We replicate the dynamics of the housing market using shocks to aggregate income, the distribution...

We use recently published long-run microdata (SCF+) to investigate generational wealth dynamics in the U.S. over the last seven decades. We document that the median wealth of people born in the first half of the 20th century increased from one ten-year birth cohort to the next. For people born...

Overindebted private households have created economic and political concern. Using measures of relative (over-) indebtedness which relate household income and debt services to different concepts of subsistence levels, this paper investigates whether severe household indebtedness is driven by...

Who is wealthy? This paper presents empirical estimates of household movements into and out of the top percents of the wealth distribution over individual life cycles. There are life-cycle motives and precautionary motives for wealth accumulation. The opportunities to accumulate wealth create...