This document provides clarifications and guidance for researchers seeking to replicate the analyses in our paper. This is important as we identified some items in the published text and the code where additional clarity would be helpful. While none of these affect our substantive conclusions,...

Die Alterssicherungskommission der Bundesregierung soll einerseits eine Kennziffer für das Gesamtversorgungsniveau aus gesetzlicher Rente, betrieblicher und geförderter Privatvorsorge entwickeln. Andererseits soll es darum gehen, wie der Lebensstandardsicherung im Alter gesichert werden kann....

Reliable statistics on the distribution of wealth - and how this has changed over time - are essential for informing a range of policy debates. Unfortunately, current official statistics from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) do not provide a coherent or consistent guide to how wealth is...

Die Alterssicherungskommission der Bundesregierung soll einerseits eine Kennziffer für das Gesamtversorgungsniveau aus gesetzlicher Rente, betrieblicher und geförderter Privatvorsorge entwickeln. Andererseits soll es darum gehen, wie der Lebensstandardsicherung im Alter gesichert werden kann....

We analyze how pension wealth influences retirement timing using 25 years of Danish administrative panel data on wealth and labor market status. Exploiting early-career variation in firm-specific mandatory pension contribution rates, we study labor supply decisions from age 55 onward. Greater...

Using unique administrative data that link privately held firm owners to rich background information, we provide novel evidence on underage children as firm owners. Ownership occurs at all ages 0--17, with a mean age of 12. Childhood ownership is strongly concentrated among high-income families,...

The fifth wave of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) offers an updated and comprehensive view of Maltese households' financial position in the post-pandemic period. Based on microdata collected for 2023, this edition introduces two analytical dimensions: in addition to the...

We analyze how pension wealth influences retirement timing using 25 years of Danish administrative panel data on wealth and labor market status. Exploiting early-career variation in firm-specific mandatory pension contribution rates, we study labor supply decisions from age 55 onward. Greater...

Euro area household wealth accumulation is commonly perceived to be impaired by negative return shocks, wealth-reducing policy measures and suboptimal investment behaviour. It is further assumed that poorer households are disproportionately affected, earn lower returns and that wealth inequality...

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...

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...

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...

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)...

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...

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....

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...

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,...

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...

This paper introduces a framework for estimating long-run series of measures of overall inequality and top wealth shares when data consist of a combination of historical tabulations and modern administrative registers of taxable wealth. The proposed framework is applicable when historical wealth...

In genetics, heterosis describes how crossbreeding produces offspring with greater fitness than their parents. We propose a socioeconomic heterosis hypothesis: does genetic diversity at the individual level benefit economic success? Using UK Biobank data (N=488,152), we find that people with...