Household aggregate wealth in the main OECD countries from 1980 to 2011: what do the data tell us?

This paper analyses aggregate household wealth in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the UK and the US. Building on a new data set for the time span 1980-2011, we discuss the trends in household financial assets in the last thirty years, the reasons for differences across countries, the tendency towards convergence, the economic interpretation of breaks in time series and the effects of the recent financial crisis. We also comment on the evolution of household debt and real assets. In discussing the empirical evidence, the paper summarises some of the recent literature on household wealth.