Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Working Paper (21)
- Report (3)
Has Fulltext
- yes (24)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (24)
Keywords
- household finance (7)
- Haushalt (4)
- Household Finance (4)
- Household Portfolios (4)
- Stockholding (4)
- social interactions (4)
- Aktienanlage (3)
- Arbeitsproduktivität (3)
- financial literacy (3)
- stockholding (3)
- Consumer Credit (2)
- Credit Cards (2)
- Europäische Währungsunion (2)
- Greece (2)
- Kreditkarte (2)
- Staatsschuldenkrise (2)
- USA (2)
- consumer credit (2)
- household debt (2)
- mortgages (2)
- refugees (2)
- Aging (1)
- Aktienmarkt (1)
- Asset Location (1)
- Counterfactual Decompositions (1)
- Cultural Influences on Economic Behavior (1)
- Debit Cards (1)
- Debt (1)
- Deutschland (1)
- Discount Broker (1)
- Equity Culture (1)
- Erwachsener, 50-65 Jahre (1)
- Financial Advice (1)
- German reunification (1)
- Greek economic crisis (1)
- Griechenland (1)
- Household Debt (1)
- Housing (1)
- Inequality (1)
- Informal Loans (1)
- Integration (1)
- Mortgages (1)
- Multivariate Probit (1)
- Portfolio Choice (1)
- Portfolio Inertia (1)
- Portfolios (1)
- Private Business (1)
- Quantile Regression (1)
- Retirement Accounts (1)
- Revolving Debt (1)
- Self Control (1)
- Simulated Maximum Likelihood (1)
- Social Interactions (1)
- Stock Trading (1)
- Unbewegliche Sache (1)
- Wealth Distribution (1)
- Wertpapierportefeuille (1)
- aging (1)
- counterfactual analysis (1)
- counterfactual decompositions (1)
- economic reforms (1)
- education (1)
- familiarity (1)
- fiscal crisis (1)
- growth (1)
- household liquidity (1)
- housing (1)
- informal loans (1)
- information networks (1)
- innovation (1)
- opportunity (1)
- peer effects (1)
- portfolio choice (1)
- private business (1)
- productivity (1)
- propagation of inequality (1)
- structural reforms (1)
- strukturelle Reformen (1)
- subjective expectations (1)
- wealth distribution (1)
- wealth inequality (1)
Debt-induced crises, including the subprime, are usually attributed exclusively to supply-side factors. We examine the role of social influences on debt culture, emanating from perceived average income of peers. Utilizing unique information from a household survey representative of the Dutch population, that circumvents the issue of defining the social circle, we consider collateralized, consumer, and informal loans. We find robust social effects on borrowing, especially among those who consider themselves poorer than their peers; and on indebtedness, suggesting a link to financial distress. We employ a number of approaches to rule out spurious associations and to handle correlated effects.
Household finance
(2020)
Household financial decisions are complex, interdependent, and heterogeneous, and central to the functioning of the financial system. We present an overview of the rapidly expanding literature on household finance (with some important exceptions) and suggest directions for future research. We begin with the theory and empirics of asset market participation and asset allocation over the lifecycle. We then discuss house-hold choices in insurance markets, trading behavior, decisions on retirement saving, and financial choices by retirees. We survey research on liabilities, including mortgage choice, refinancing, and default, and household behavior in unsecured credit markets, including credit cards and payday lending. We then connect the household to its social environment, including peer effects, cultural and hereditary factors, intra-household financial decision making, financial literacy, cognition and educational interventions. We also discuss literature on the provision and consumption of financial advice.
We merge administrative information from a large German discount brokerage firm with regional data to examine if financial advisors improve portfolio performance. Our data track accounts of 32,751 randomly selected individual customers over 66 months and allow direct comparison of performance across self-managed accounts and accounts run by, or in consultation with, independent financial advisors. In contrast to the picture painted by simple descriptive statistics, econometric analysis that corrects for the endogeneity of the choice of having a financial advisor suggests that advisors are associated with lower total and excess account returns, higher portfolio risk and probabilities of losses, and higher trading frequency and portfolio turnover relative to what account owners of given characteristics tend to achieve on their own. Regression analysis of who uses an IFA suggests that IFAs are matched with richer, older investors rather than with poorer, younger ones.
There is a prevalent view outside Greece that promotion of competitiveness is tantamount with price reductions for Greek goods and services. Massive horizontal salary cuts appear, at first, to promote competitiveness by reducing unit labor costs and to reduce fiscal deficits by reducing the wage bill of the public sector. Upon closer look, however, horizontal salary cuts have been much greater than needed for Greek competitiveness, providing an alibi vis a vis the Troika for reforms that are still to be implemented, but at the same time undermining both competitiveness and the potential to reduce public debt through sustainable development.
Prodigal Italy Greece Spain?
(2011)
Contrary to widely held perceptions, workers in the southern European states that are most afflicted by the sovereign debt crisis work hard. However, labor productivity in these countries lags far behind the EU average. Structural reforms to boost productivity should be at the top of the reform agenda.
Neither Northerners are willing to invest in a South they perceive as unwilling to undertake necessary structural reforms, nor are Southerners willing to invest in their countries in a climate of austerity and policy uncertainty imposed, in their view, by the North. This results in a vicious cycle of mistrust. However, as the author argues, big steps in the direction of reforms may provide just enough thrust to break out of this vicious cycle, propel southern countries – and especially Greece – to a much happier future, and promote the chances for more balanced economic performance in North and South.
Außerhalb Griechenlands herrscht die Ansicht vor, dass eine höhere Wettbewerbsfähigkeit gleichbedeutend ist mit Preissenkungen für Güter und Dienstleistungen. Angesichts der begrenzten Bereitschaft in Griechenland, Reformen umzusetzen, fordern die Gläubiger drastische Lohnkürzungen, um die Produktivität zu erhöhen und die öffentlichen Ausgaben zu senken. Doch mit einer Kürzungsrunde nach der anderen lässt sich Wettbewerbsfähigkeit nicht erreichen. Umfangreiche flächendeckende Lohnkürzungen reduzieren vielmehr die erwartete Produktivität, da sie die besten Arbeitnehmer vertreiben, dem Rest Anreize zur Produktivität nehmen und neue gute Leute fernhalten.
This paper uses unique administrative data and a quasi-field experiment of exogenous allocation in Sweden to estimate medium- and longer-run effects on financial behavior from exposure to financially literate neighbors. It contributes evidence of causal impact of exposure and of a social multiplier of financial knowledge, but also of unfavorable distributional aspects of externalities. Exposure promotes saving in private retirement accounts and stockholding, especially when neighbors have economics or business education, but only for educated households and when interaction possibilities are substantial. Findings point to transfer of knowledge rather than mere imitation or effects through labor, education, or mobility channels.
The authors present evidence of a new propagation mechanism for wealth inequality, based on differential responses, by education, to greater inequality at the start of economic life. The paper is motivated by a novel positive cross-country relationship between wealth inequality and perceptions of opportunity and fairness, which holds only for the more educated. Using unique administrative micro data and a quasi-field experiment of exogenous allocation of households, the authors find that exposure to a greater top 10% wealth share at the start of economic life in the country leads only the more educated placed in locations with above-median wealth mobility to attain higher wealth levels and position in the cohort-specific wealth distribution later on. Underlying this effect is greater participation in risky financial and real assets and in self-employment, with no evidence for a labor income, unemployment risk, or human capital investment channel. This differential response is robust to controlling for initial exposure to fixed or other time-varying local features, including income inequality, and consistent with self-fulfilling responses of the more educated to perceived opportunities, without evidence of imitation or learning from those at the top.