Decomposing household wealth portfolios across countries: An age-old question?

Eva Sierminska and Karina Doorley

No 2012-32, LISER Working Paper Series from Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)

Abstract: Using harmonized wealth data and a novel decomposition approach, we show that cohort effects exist in the income pro?les of asset and debt portfolios for a sample of European countries and the U.S. We ?nd that observable characteristics explain a sizable portion of the wealth participation gap for the young in particular. Similar patterns are observed for most countries for the level of wealth held, conditional on participation. The bottom of the wealth distribution in the European countries (particularly Spain and Luxembourg) is, however, characterized by large unexplained differences to the U.S. distribution, possibly pointing to the existence of important safety nets, which shape wealth holdings in these countries. In accordance with past literature, we ?nd that institutions and other unobservables play a larger role for mature households (50 and over). We will also discuss the potential effect of the crisis on these results.

Keywords: household portfolios; decomposition; wealth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 60 pages
Date: 2012-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.liser.lu/publi_viewer.cfm?tmp=2626 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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:irs:cepswp:2012-32

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LISER Working Paper Series from Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) 11, Porte des Sciences, L-4366 Esch-sur-Alzette, G.-D. Luxembourg. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Library and Documentation ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).