Unique administrative data on a representative population's cognitive abilities, spending, and financials reveal that consumers at or below median cognitive abilities barely react when their incentives to spend or borrow change, even if they earn high incomes and are financially unconstrained...

This report summarises the methodologies used in the fourth wave of the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey, which provides household-level data collected in a harmonised way in all 19 euro area countries, as well as in the Czech Republic, Croatia and Hungary. The total sample...

This report summarises the stylized facts from the fourth wave of the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey, which provides household-level data collected in a harmonised way in all 19 euro area countries, as well as in the Czech Republic, Croatia and Hungary for a sample of more...

This paper develops an agent-based modelling approach to quantify the impact of COVID-19-induced economic disruptions on household debt and unplanned savings over 2020. We merge data from the Survey of Financial Security and the Survey of Household Spending to construct a representative...

We analyze the relationship of the distribution of future GDP growth and accumulation of household debt in Finnish macroeconomic data from 1980 to 2019. We find clear evidence that exuberant accumulation of household debt is related to the thickening of the left tail of the future growth...

This paper examines whether the determinants of household saving have changed over time and whether they are the same across countries. Using a cross-country data for 34 OECD countries for the 1970-2019, we find that traditional saving rate specifications still perform strik ingly well and can...

We study whether the level of household indebtedness is related to the interest rate elasticity of private consumption. Looking at Finnish aggregate data, we find no robust evidence of increased interest rate elasticity of private consumption even as the household sector's debt-to-income ratio...

We study the impact of the recent cost-of-living crisis on European households using detailed data on individual consumption, income and wealth. We account for the various channels through which inflation affects individual households, and for the monetary and fiscal policy responses to the...

We examine a propagation mechanism that arises from households' long-term borrowing and show empirically that it has sizable real effects. The mechanism recognises that when there is long-term debt, an impulse to new borrowing generates a predictable hump-shaped path of future debt service. We...

This paper explores the feasibility of calculating absolute poverty lines on the basis of minimum food expenditures in developed countries. It makes three important contributions. First, it demonstrates that standard statistical methods used in the developing world deliver either inadequate...