To date, research on household wealth has seldom focused on households’ business equity holdings. Such equity stakes represent above all ownership in domestic limited liability companies. This study for the first time provides an empirical analysis of the distribution of Austrian households’...

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 studies the gender wealth gap using 2010 Household Finance and Consumption Survey data for 15 European countries, and finds that households with only one male adult have more net wealth than households with one female adult, and that households with an adult couple have the highest...

Credit limit variability is a crucial aspect of the consumption, savings, and debt decisions of households in the United States. Using a large panel, this paper first demonstrates that individuals gain and lose access to credit frequently and often have their credit limits reduced unexpectedly....

This paper provides a joint analysis of household stockholding participation, stock location among stockholding modes, and participation spillovers, using data from the US Survey of Consumer Finances. Our multivariate choice model matches observed participation rates, conditional and...

I develop a general equilibrium model in which the quality of household financial decisions is endogenously determined by the incentives to exert effort in learning about financial opportunities. The model generates predictions for asset market participation and returns across households....

Although consumer finance is a substantial element of the economy, it has had a smaller footprint within financial economics. In this review, I suggest a functional definition of the subfield of consumer finance, focusing on four key functions: payments, risk management, moving funds from today...

We assess investment sophistication in a large sample of auto-enrolled, retirement plan member choices. A strong preference for using a small number of investment options is provided with little evidence, overall, to support equally weighted allocations. However, when multiple options are...

The total financial wealth of households can be deduced from the financial accounts, and their total real wealth can be assessed on the basis of estimates of property ownership and property prices. However, these macroeconomic information sources reveal little about the distribution of wealth...

In this paper, we analyze how the introduction of habits and aspirations affects the distribution of wealth when individuals labor productivity is subject to idiosyncratic shocks and bequests arise from a joy-of-giving motive. In the presence of either bequests or aspirations, labor income...