Effects of the ECB's Unconventional Monetary Policy on Real and Financial Wealth

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

No 286, Department of Economics Working Paper Series from WU Vienna University of Economics and Business

Abstract: We assess the impact of the ECB's unconventional monetary policy (UMP) on the wealth distribution of households in ten euro area countries. For this purpose, we estimate the effects of an ECB balance sheet expansion on financial asset and housing prices by means of vector autoregressions. We then use the estimates to carry out micro simulations based on data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). We find that the overall effect of UMP on the net wealth distribution of households differs depending on which wealth inequality indicators we use. There is an inequality-increasing effect for the majority of the countries under review when we use wealth inequality indicators that are sensitive to changes at the tails of the wealth distribution. The effect is more equalizing when we base our assessment on the Gini coefficient. It is also important to note that one-third of the households in our sample does not hold financial or housing wealth and is thus not directly affected by UMP measures via the asset price channel.

Keywords: Monetary Policy; Inequality; Wealth; Quantitative Easing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-07
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 (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://epub.wu.ac.at/7040/ original version (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (https://epub.wu.ac.at/7040/ [308 PERMANENT REDIRECT]--> https://epub.wu.ac.at/id/eprint/7040 [302 FOUND]--> https://research.wu.ac.at/en/publications/6629e93b-5712-4783-8f76-ca57902a6009)

Related works:
Working Paper: Effects of the ECB’s Unconventional Monetary Policy on Real and Financial Wealth (2019)
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:wiw:wus005:7040

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics Working Paper Series from WU Vienna University of Economics and Business Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by WU Library ().