We use household surveys to describe differences in wages, income, wealth and liquid assets of households born in their country of residence (“natives”) vs. those born in other EU and non-EU countries (“immigrants”). The differences in wealth are more substantial than the differences in...

The US Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) and the Eurosystem's Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) provide evidence that wealth is heavily concentrated at the upper tail of the wealth distribution. A commonly cited number for the US is that 1 percent of the households hold 30 percent...

This paper studies the effects of quantitative easing on income and wealth of individual euro area households. The aggregate effects of quantitative easing are estimated in a multi-country VAR model of the four largest euro area countries, in which key variables affecting household income and...

Globalisation has a major impact on the levels and distribution of wealth. The financial markets are highly integrated, and valuations of financial assets follow international patterns, which has contributed to large increases in financial wealth over the past 25 years. Nonetheless, this has not...

The report on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress by Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi concludes that in the measurement of household welfare all material components should be covered, i.e. consumption, income and wealth, from both the micro as well as the macro perspective....

Using microdata from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), this study examines the role of inheritance, income and welfare state policies in explaining differences in household net wealth within and between euro area countries. First, about one third of the households in the 13...

We study the link between household structure and cross country differences in the wealth distribution using a recently compiled data set for the euro area (HFCS). We estimate counterfactual distributions using non-parametric re-weighting to examine the extent to which differences in the...

Borrower-based macroprudential (MP) policies - such as caps on loan-to-value (LTV) ratios and debt-service-to-income (DSTI) limits - contain the build-up of systemic risk by reducing the probability and conditional impact of a crisis. While LTV/DSTI limits can increase inequality at...

This paper considers how monetary policy produces heterogeneous effects on euro area households, depending on the composition of their income and on the components of their wealth. We first review the existing evidence on how monetary policy affects income and wealth inequality. We then...

Distributional accounts for households enable measurement, study developments andidentify drivers of inequality. Distributional information on households’ wealth is availablefrom the Household Finance and Consumption Survey only for three points in time (2009 –2018), while aggregates are...