We use data from the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to explore how household asset portfolios in the United States evolved between 1989 and 2016. Throughout this period, two key assets - housing and financial market assets - drove the household balance sheet evolution;...

The neoclassical growth model is extended to include costly intermediated borrowing and lending between households. This is an important extension as substantial resources are used to intermediate the large amount of borrowing and lending between households. In 2007, in the United States, the...

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...

Today the financial services sector has become highly diversified offering the investor with a wide range of investment avenues. With proper investment strategies and financial planning investor can increase personal wealth which will contribute to higher economic growth. Economic growth is...

Home ownership is widely stimulated by policy yet its effects are poorly understood. Exploiting privatization decisions of municipally-owned apartment buildings, we obtain random variation in home ownership for otherwise similar buildings with similar tenants. Granular data on demographics,...

This chapter is concerned with the distribution of personal wealth, which usually refers to the material assets that can be sold in the marketpace, although on occasion pension rights are also included. We summarise the available evidence on wealth distribution for a number of countries. This...

Private consumption, i.e., spending of households, is a key economic variable. While data on private consumption are widely available on a national, aggregate level, disaggregated data on household spending are scarce, particularly in the form of a panel. To fill this gap, we make use of Swiss...

This paper investigates empirically why Japan's household savings rate fell in the 1990s. We constructed an economic model consisting of two types of household: unconstrained life-cycle households and liquidity-constrained households. Unconstrained households generally save, but...

Reliable estimates of actual household saving rates in New Zealand have proved elusive as existing sources of data have in the past given disparate estimates, making it difficult to reach a consensus of the real rate of household saving. For the first time in New Zealand, however, longitudinal...

It is well known that homeowners are richer than renters, even after controlling for observable characteristics. This is often used as an argument for policies that foster homeownership. However, the causal link between homeownership and wealth is difficult to establish due to many potential...