How does household wealth influence consumption? The empirical evidence brought so far by the literature is unclear, mostly because of the low quality of the data more readily available: aggregate data, cross sections and panel datasets lacking important variables all present major shortcomings...

As it evolves around the world, Social Security financed on pay-as-you-go (PAYG) basis increasingly becomes a Ponzi scheme due to aging populations. The main objective of Social Security is to insure seniors against an uncertain life span. However, as the probability of being a net loser rises...

The paper investigates the interdependence of household financial liabilities and assets, with special focus on the impact of liabilities on households’ holdings of financial assets. The paper uses the new ECB Household Finance and Consumption Survey from 2009–2010 covering euro area...

Results from the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey reveal substantial variation in household net wealth across euro area countries that await explanation. This paper focuses on three main factors for the wealth accumulation process, i) homeownership, ii) housing value...

We use data from the European Household Finance and Consumption Survey in order to examine the distributional effect of intergenerational wealth transfers on the net worth distribution in 8 European countries and compare it to recent findings for the US. To do so, we resort to the decomposition...

Results from the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey reveal substantial variation in household net wealth across euro area countries that await explanation. This paper focuses on three main factors for the wealth accumulation process, i) homeownership, ii) housing value...

As significant part of national wealth, households' wealth is the central issue in both policy debate and academic literature. Nevertheless, in Hungary little effort has been made so far to conduct thorough evaluation of households' wealth for the last decade. Under the auspices of the plural of...

While the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has much to offer researchers studying household behavior, one limitation is that its summary measure of wealth is not as broad as those of other commonly used surveys, such as the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), because it does not include the...

Housing is the greatest asset held by most households, and it is an important determinant of their financing and consumption decisions. Despite the fact that measuring housing wealth is crucial for understanding households' economic behavior, this indicator is currently unavailable in Mexico due...

In the absence of any correlation between wealth and entrepreneurial talent, initial net wealth should have an explanatory power in the decision to become an entrepreneur only for households that are financially constrained; further, its importance should decrease with wealth. I test these...