An apparent paradox in household wealth accumulation in the United States is the relatively small holding of financial assets and the large holding of housing wealth. To explain the high concentration of household wealth in housing, this paper estimates the marginal propensity to consume from...

The consumption function for the U.S. economy is estimated with real estate and financial wealth for quarterly data for 1952:1--2001:4. An additional dollar of real estate wealth increases consumption by 8 cents in the current year, as compared with only 2 cents for financial wealth. The results...