The ECB recently published the first results of the euro area Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) and a report on the methodologies applied (ECB, 2013a and 2013b). The fact that the HFCS results vary considerably across the euro area gives rise to questions regarding their...

By virtue of the Ricardian Equivalence (RE) proposition, government bonds do not represent net wealth. Therefore, household's savings will increase to offset the government policy. The paper econometrically tests if governments bonds do represent net wealth based on the time series macrodata...

This paper investigates the effect of mortgage equity withdrawal on saving in the US over the period 1993–2011. A multivariate time series analysis based on a vector error correction model (VECM) is carried out. The saving rate, mortgage equity withdrawal, net wealth, interest rates and...

The objective of this paper is to analyse the extent to which membership of KiwiSaver has been associated with greater accumulations of net wealth. The paper utilises two linked sources of data which cover the period 2002 to 2010: Statistics New Zealand’s Survey of Family, Income and...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss zakat for business entities, in this regards Islamic banking institutions. There is a debate on whether or not business entities are obliged to pay zakat. However a sort of consensus has been concluded that a business entities owned by Moslems...

This paper builds on existing studies on households’ financial distress and provides new evidence on the determinants of financial hardship in Italy and its persistence over time. It suggests a quantitative definition of financial distress based on the distribution of net wealth, and tests...