Income and wealth of euro area households in times of ultra-loose monetary policy: stylised facts from new national and financial accounts data

Manuel Rupprecht ()

Empirica, 2020, vol. 47, issue 2, No 4, 302 pages

Abstract: Abstract It is often purported that the ECB’s ultra-loose monetary policy significantly affects household income and financial wealth. Considering selected euro area countries, this paper addresses two questions: first, how did households net interest income develop in recent years? Second, did portfolio structures change? Based on recently extended national accounts data, I derive stylised facts suggesting that net interest income indeed changed with monetary policy. However, patterns differ across countries. Whereas households in some countries suffered from declining incomes, in other countries they achieved incomes which, considered in real terms, were substantially higher than before. Tentative links to household balance sheets and their interest rate fixation suggest that these factors outweigh the significance of monetary policy. Regarding portfolios, however, less divergence is observed. Risk-taking did not increase in any country, despite the low yields of safe assets. General statements claiming that the ECB’s monetary policy has solely negative effects for household finances therefore seem to be inadequate.

Keywords: Monetary policy; Household wealth; Interest income; Portfolio structure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E21 E43 G11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10663-018-9416-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:kap:empiri:v:47:y:2020:i:2:d:10.1007_s10663-018-9416-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ration/journal/10663

DOI: 10.1007/s10663-018-9416-8

Access Statistics for this article

Empirica is currently edited by Fritz Breuss and Fritz Breuss

More articles in Empirica from Springer, Austrian Institute for Economic Research, Austrian Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().