Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/297305 
Year of Publication: 
2023
Series/Report no.: 
ECB Working Paper No. 2865
Publisher: 
European Central Bank (ECB), Frankfurt a. M.
Abstract: 
The Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) provides valuable information for the monetary policy and financial stability purposes. The dataset shows, however, inconsistencies with National Account (NtlA) statistics, as the aggregated HFCS micro data do usually not match the corresponding NtlA macro data. Therefore, we suggest a solution to close the gap via an optimization problem that aims at preserving for each wealth instrument the level of inequality measured by the Gini coefficient. In addition, a lower and an upper bound of inequality are derived, that can be reached by extreme allocations of the wealth discrepancies across the households. Finally, based on the German HFCS, we compare the findings with another approach suggested in the literature that uses a "multivariate calibration". The comparison indicates that the multivariate calibration may reallocate households' wealth beyond the observed discrepancies, thereby leading to Gini coefficients that exceed the analytically derived upper bound of inequality.
Subjects: 
Wealth inequality
HFCS
National Accounts
Optimization problem
JEL: 
C46
C61
D31
G51
N3
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
ISBN: 
978-92-899-6242-1
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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