The paper investigates the extent to which household indebtedness suppressed consumption during the economic downturn in 2008-2009. The paper uses a unique quarterly panel dataset containing financial information on over 100,000 individuals. The dataset covers the period 2005-2011, when there...

The linkages between housing wealth and household consumption are contentious. This paper uses a recently introduced statistical concept, housing equity withdrawal (HEW), to investigate the linkages in the case of Estonia. HEW is defined as net borrowing by the household sector, which is secured...

The paper investigates the extent to which household indebtedness suppressed consumption during the economic downturn in 2008-2009. The paper uses a unique quarterly panel dataset containing financial information on over 100,000 individuals. The dataset covers the period 2005-2011, when there...

Pissarides & Weber (1989) proposed the use of data on income and food consumption for estimating the extent of income underreporting and possibly tax evasion by the self-employed. This paper is the first to investigate the importance of the way in which self-employed households are identified....

The paper studies the determinants of the interest rate spreads in Estonia, a country that stands out among European countries for its wide spreads. Four distinct credit markets are considered for housing loans, consumer loans, long-term corporate loans and short-term corporate loans. The paper...

Using unique account-level data from a high inflation period in Estonia in 2005-11 and interactive fixed effect estimation, we find individual consumption to depend on personal beyond national headline inflation. Foreign shocks to selected goods’ inflation affect disproportionately households...

This paper studies the gender gap in net wealth. We use administrative data on wealth that are linked to the Estonian Household Finance and Consumption Survey, which provides individual-level wealth data for all household types. We find that the unconditional gender gap in mean wealth is 45% and...