This paper produces new evidence and stylised facts on housing, wealth accumulation and wealth distribution, relying on an in-depth analysis of micro-based data on household wealth across OECD countries. The analysis addresses several questions: i) How is homeownership and housing tenure...

Using Danish household level data, we find that a relatively large share of total interest-only mortgage debt is held by families with few liquid assets and high loan to value ratios. This may arise because families with interest-only loans do not fully use the lower instalments to increase...

We study how individuals respond to the removal of a saving constraint. Mortgage run-offs predictably relax a saving constraint for borrowers who chose mortgage contracts that committed them to effectively save by paying down mortgage principal. Using the universe the Danish populations we...

This paper studies the adoption and impact of prize-linked savings (PLS) accounts, which offer random, lottery-like payouts to individual account holders in lieu of interest. Using micro-level data from a bank offering these products in South Africa, we show that PLS is attractive to a broad...

This paper exploits an administrative regulation in Singapore that allows individuals to withdraw between 10 to 30 percent of their pension savings at age 55. We find a large and highly significant increase in individuals' bank account balances within the first month of turning 55, which...

To incentivize households to increase private savings, the Indian government implemented in July 2014 a new tax-subsidized saving policy that largely incentivizes homeowners by allowing them to exempt an additional 50,000 INR ($833) of the mortgage principal and interest payments from taxable...

This study centers on the household saving rate in Latin America by constructing a new database from 27 household surveys in 10 countries. At the statistical level, about half of the households present negative saving. This fact, coupled with the discrepancy with national accounts data, suggests...

Previous work on entrepreneurship and wealth has documented that entrepreneurial households are wealthier and have higher wealth mobility. However, the literature has not paid attention to the components of wealth change. Furthermore, endogeneity problems in the measurement of the interaction...

This paper applies Canova JAE 1994 methodology to perform a thorough sensitivity analysis for the Aiyagari QJE 1994 economy. This is a calibrated GE model with incomplete markets and uninsurable income risk, designed to quantify the size of precautionary savings and the degree of wealth...

In this paper we compare static and dynamic savings plans with lump sum investments from the perspective of a prospect theory investor. To evaluate these strategies we use an ex ante approach taking recourse to Monte Carlo Simulation and parameters from Tversky and Kahneman (1992) and check the...