EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Quantitative Easing and Wealth Inequality: The Asset Price Channel

Clara De Luigi, Martin Feldkircher, Philipp Poyntner and Helene Schuberth

Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 2023, vol. 85, issue 3, 638-670

Abstract: We assess the impact of the ECB's unconventional monetary policy, specifically of quantitative easing (QE), on the distribution of household wealth in nine euro area countries. For this purpose, we estimate the effects of a QE shock on housing and risky financial asset prices by means of local projections. We then use these estimates to carry out micro‐simulations based on data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). For the majority of the countries under review, expansionary QE via asset prices leads to net wealth inequality increases when measured using wealth indicators that are sensitive to changes at the tails of the wealth distribution. This finding contrasts with results based on the Gini coefficient which point to an equalizing impact of QE. One‐third of the households in our sample holds neither housing nor financial wealth and is thus not directly affected by QE measures through the asset prices channel.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/obes.12543

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:obuest:v:85:y:2023:i:3:p:638-670

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0305-9049

Access Statistics for this article

Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Christopher Adam, Anindya Banerjee, Christopher Bowdler, David Hendry, Adriaan Kalwij, John Knight and Jonathan Temple

More articles in Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics from Department of Economics, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery (contentdelivery@wiley.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:bla:obuest:v:85:y:2023:i:3:p:638-670