The Household Wealth Distribution in Spain: The Role of Housing and Financial Wealth

Francisco Azpitarte
Additional contact information
Francisco Azpitarte: Universidade de Vigo

No 83, Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality

Abstract: We analyse the distribution of household wealth in Spain using the first wave of the Spanish Survey of Household Finances, conducted by the Bank of Spain in 2002. We study the distribution of the different wealth components and, using inequality decomposition techniques, we assess the contribution of each element to overall wealth inequality. We find that wealth is more unequally distributed than income, while housing wealth is much more evenly distributed than financial wealth. Moreover, we identify two groups of wealth components: one disequalizing group, which includes financial wealth, whose value and portfolio share increase with household wealth; and a second more equalizing one, including housing wealth, whose value increases with wealth, but their share in the portfolio does not. Finally, we show that differences between age groups do not explain why wealth is much more unequally distributed than income. Instead, business and home ownership are factors that clearly contribute to explain this feature.

Keywords: Wealth; income; distribution; inequality decomposition. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 D31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2008-83.pdf (application/pdf)

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:inq:inqwps:ecineq2008-83

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maria Ana Lugo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).