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标题：Net wealth across the euro area - why household structure matters and how to control for it
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作者：Pirmin Fessler ; Peter Lindner ; Esther Segalla 等
期刊名称：Euro Area Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Statistics
印刷版ISSN：1830-3420
电子版ISSN：1830-3439
出版年度：2014
出版社：European Central Bank
摘要：We study the link between household structure and cross country dierences in the wealthdistribution using a recently compiled data set for the euro area (HFCS). We estimate counterfac-tual distributions using non-parametric re-weighting to examine the extent to which dierencesin the unconditional distributions of wealth across euro area countries can be explained by dier-ences in household structure. We nd that imposing a common household structure has strongeects on both the full unconditional distributions as well as its mappings to dierent inequalitymeasures. For the median 50% of the dierences are explained for Austria, 15% for Germany,25% for Italy, 14% for Spain and 38% for Malta. For others as Belgium, France, Greece, Lux-embourg, Portugal, Slovenia and Slovakia household structure masks the dierences to the euroarea median and Finland and the Netherlands change their position from below to above theeuro area median. The impact on the mean and percentile ratios is similarly strong and varieswith regard to direction and level across countries and their distributions. We can conrm thending of Bover (2010) that the eect on the Gini is somewhat less pronounced, but might maskrelevant information by being a net eect of dierent accumulated eects along the distribution.Country rankings based on almost all of these measures are severely aected alluding to theneed for cautious interpretation when dealing with such rankings. Furthermore, the explanatorypower of household structure changes along the net wealth distribution. Therefore we argue formore exible controls for household structure. We provide such a set of controls to account forhousehold type xed eects which are based on the number of household members as well aspossible combinations of age categories and gender.
关键词：Wealth Distribution; Household Structure; Survey Methodology;Unconditional Distribution; Non-Parametric Re-Weighting; Counterfactuals