Mind the wealth gap: a new allocation method to match micro and macro statistics on household wealth

Michele Cantarella (), Andrea Neri and Giovanna Ranalli ()
Additional contact information
Giovanna Ranalli: Università degli Studi di Perugia

No 646, Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: The financial and economic crisis that have shaken many countries in the last years have increased demand for timely, coherent and consistent distributional information for the household sector. In the Euro area, most of the national central banks collect such information through income and wealth surveys, which are often used to inform their decisions. These surveys, however, may be affected by non-response and under-reporting, determining a mismatch with macroeconomic figures from national accounts. In this paper, we develop a novel allocation method that extends proportional allocation and combines information from a power law (Pareto) model with imputation procedures based on calibration to address these issues simultaneously, when only limited external information is available. Finally, we produce distributional indicators for four Euro-Area countries, which are consistent with their national accounts.

Keywords: wealth distribution; non-response; measurement error; Pareto distribution; survey calibration; household finance and consumption survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 E01 E21 N3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2021-0646/QEF_646_21.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Mind the wealth gap: a new allocation method to match micro and macro statistics for household wealth (2021)
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:bdi:opques:qef_646_21

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().