This paper estimates rates of return on wealth across gross wealth groups by matching individual-level survey data with macroeconomic return data for Germany. Using machine learning for more detailed financial asset categories, we find that the average nominal rate of return on gross assets for...

The increasing concentration of income and wealth on the national and international level is a topic that has received increased attention both in social science research as well as public policy debates. While data availability is a well-known and often-lamented problem in wealth studies,...

Will ageing societies in Europe lead to a new savings glut? To address this potential consequence of demographic change, we assess the relationship between population ageing and safe assets in the euro area, using data from the Eurosystem's Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Our...

Asset accumulation in later life is a pressing issue in Japan due to the growing gap between life expectancy (87.14 years for women, 81.09 years for men in 2023) and the retirement age (65 or less). This gap heightens financial insecurity, emphasizing the need to meet asset goals by 65....

In this paper, we study the role of wealth transfers in shaping homeownership in Malta. Leveraging data from four waves of the Maltese Household Finance and Consumption Survey, we perform a logistic regression to investigate how financial inflows in the form of gifts or inheritances, affect (i)...

Estimates of social insurance pension wealth are available for a number of Western economies, including Austria for the year 2017. Such wealth may be compared with conventional wealth in terms of size and distribution and when we add such estimates to measures of wealth in the conventional...

We study international migration responses of the super-rich to taxes using UK administrative data and a difference-in-differences design. We exploit a reform that removes access to a tax break on foreign income for foreigners based on their number of years in the UK, allowing us to compare...

The total wealth of Britain's households in 2018 to 2020 was approximately £2.2 trillion less than was previously believed - a 14% reduction. That, at least, is the implication of a recent change in methodology made by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to the UK's leading official...

The current system of private pension savings in the UK is based on employers choosing a workplace pension provider, to which contributions from the employee and employer are sent, and which invests the contributions on behalf of the employee. This means that when an individual leaves their...

This report examines ethnic differences in pension participation in the UK following the nationwide roll-out of automatic enrolment, the drivers of those gaps, and the consequences for wealth accumulation. It draws on an academic research paper (Cribb, O'Brien and Sturrock, 2025) published...

This report describes patterns of co-residence of young adults at a parental home in the United Kingdom. We show how the rate of co-residence varies across dimensions such as income, region and ethnicity. We show how it has changed in recent years and discuss potential drivers of the rise...

Accurate and comprehensive measurement of household livelihoods is critical for monitoring progress toward poverty alleviation and targeting social assistance programs for those who most need it. However, the high cost of traditional data collection has historically made comprehensive...

Do older workers change their labor supply in response to unexpected housing wealth losses (or gains)? Housing wealth is the largest component in most older Americans' portfolios, and they may seek to recoup losses by working longer to help smooth consumption in retirement. Despite its...

In this report, we consider policies to help people appropriately manage their defined contribution (DC) pension wealth through later life. We draw on evidence in a report published alongside this one (Boileau, Cribb and Emmerson, 2025), which sets out key information on the landscape in which...

This report is one of two reports on the management of pension wealth in retirement conducted as part of the Pensions Review, led by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in partnership with the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust. In this report, we examine the decisions that older individuals face as...

Investors appear to regularly fail to make adequate investment decisions in the context of financial provision because of both economic and psychological irrationality. However, despite an economic urgency to make appropriate investment decisions for a secure financial future, people tend to...

We use administrative data for Norway to estimate an incomplete-market life-cycle model of retired singles and couples with a bequest motive, health-dependent utility, and uncertain longevity and health. We allow the parameters of the bequest utility to differ between households with and without...

The Philippines has set an ambitious goal of becoming a predominantly middle-class society free of poverty by 2040. However, this aspiration comes at a time of significant global headwinds that pose risks to the country's development trajectory. Growing the middle class is more closely related...

We use 25 years of tax records for the Norwegian population to study the mobility of wealth over people's lifetimes. We find considerable wealth mobility over the life cycle. To understand the underlying mobility patterns, we group individuals with similar wealth rank histories using...

German history over the past 125 years has been turbulent. Marked by two world wars, revolutions and major regime changes, as well as a hyperinflation and three currency reforms, expropriations and territorial divisions, it comprises extreme shocks to study the role of historical events,...

U.S. equity outperformance and sustained dollar appreciation have led to large valuation gains for the rest of the world on the U.S. external position. The author constructs their global distribution, carefully accounting for the role of tax havens. Valuation gains are concentrated and large in...

In this paper, I analyze detailed data on intergenerational transfers in 4 countries (China, India, Japan, and the United States) from the "Japan Household Panel Survey on Consumer Preferences and Satisfaction (JHPS-CPS)" which has been conducted by the Institute of Social and Economic Research...