Survey data on household finance and consumption - research summary and policy use

The first part of this paper provides a brief survey of the recent literature that employs survey data on household finance and consumption. Given the breadth of the topic, it focuses on issues that are particularly relevant for policy, namely i) wealth effects on consumption, ii) housing prices and household indebtedness, iii) retirement income, consumption and pension reforms, iv) access to credit and credit constraints, v) financial innovation, consumption smoothing and portfolio selection and vi) wealth inequality. The second part uses concrete examples to summarise how results from such surveys feed into policy-making within the central banks that already conduct such surveys. JEL Classification: C42, D12, D14.Household finance, consumption, survey data.

Household Income Composition and Household Goods

The paper focuses on the change in household income composition and the factors that determine it. The results bring additional knowledge about household poverty dynamics. Based on the collective approach to the family and the cooperative game theory it is constructed theoretical model of household income composition change. The change in income composition is a result from bargaining between household members in attempt to defend the most suitable for them income source. Decisive influence in the household income pattern bargaining have specific set of household goods. Through empirical analysis of European Community Household Panel 2003 data it is proved that the adoption of definite income compositions (with prevailing wages and salaries share and with prevailing social transfers share) is a result from the availability of specific set of household goods.household income pattern ; household goods ; cooperative game theory

Household Production and the Household Economy.

Household production is the production of the goods and services by the members of a household, for their own consumption, using their own capital and their own unpaid labor. Goods and services produced by households for their own use include accommodation, meals, clean clothes, and child care. The process of household production involves the transformation of purchased intermediate commodities into final consumption commodities. Households use their own capital and their own labor.PRODUCTION ; HOUSEHOLD ; LABOUR ; CAPITAL

Household-level risk factors for secondary influenza-like illness in a rural area of Bangladesh

This article is made available for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic.Objective To describe household‐level risk factors for secondary influenza‐like illness (ILI), an important public health concern in the low‐income population of Bangladesh. Methods Secondary analysis of control participants in a randomised controlled trial evaluating the effect of handwashing to prevent household ILI transmission. We recruited index‐case patients with ILI – fever (<5 years); fever, cough or sore throat (≥5 years) – from health facilities, collected information on household factors and conducted syndromic surveillance among household contacts for 10 days after resolution of index‐case patients’ symptoms. We evaluated the associations between household factors at baseline and secondary ILI among household contacts using negative binomial regression, accounting for clustering by household. Results Our sample was 1491 household contacts of 184 index‐case patients. Seventy‐one percentage reported that smoking occurred in their home, 27% shared a latrine with one other household and 36% shared a latrine with >1 other household. A total of 114 household contacts (7.6%) had symptoms of ILI during follow‐up. Smoking in the home (RRadj 1.9, 95% CI: 1.2, 3.0) and sharing a latrine with one household (RRadj 2.1, 95% CI: 1.2, 3.6) or >1 household (RRadj 3.1, 95% CI: 1.8–5.2) were independently associated with increased risk of secondary ILI. Conclusion Tobacco use in homes could increase respiratory illness in Bangladesh. The mechanism between use of shared latrines and household ILI transmission is not clear. It is possible that respiratory pathogens could be transmitted through faecal contact or contaminated fomites in shared latrines

UK household portfolios

This paper presents a detailed analysis of the composition of household portfolios, usingboth aggregate and micro-data. Among the key findings are that:• Most household wealth is held in the form of housing and pensions. Over time, there hasbeen a shift away from housing towards financial assets, driven largely by the growth inlife and pension funds.• Liquid financial wealth (excluding life and pension funds) is not predominantly held inrisky form. By far the most commonly held asset is an interest-bearing account at a bankor building society account. Of people with positive (liquid) financial wealth, more thanhalf is held in savings accounts.• The importance of risky assets in an individual’s portfolio varies according to theircharacteristics. The unconditional portfolio share held in risky assets (i.e. averagedacross those with and without any risky assets) rises with both age and total financialwealth. However, most of the variation in unconditional portfolio shares is due todifferences in ownership rates as opposed to the proportion of the portfolio held in riskyassets. Looking only at the people within each wealth decile who have risky assets, theconditional portfolio share is relatively constant across wealth, suggesting a possible rolefor entry costs or other fixed costs in explaining portfolio holdings. Multivariate analysisshows that the conditional portfolio share in risky assets actually falls with age asclassical portfolio theory would predict.• Finally, the tax treatment of savings products has an effect on portfolio choice. Separateprobit regressions for the ownership of tax-favoured assets and similar assets without thetax exemption, show that, controlling for other factors, marginal tax rates are important in determining asset ownership. These results are in accordance with those found by Poterba in the US

Reconciling workless measures at the individual and household level: theory and evidence from the United States, Britain, Germany, Spain and Australia

Individual and household based aggregate measures of worklessness can, and do, offer conflicting signals about labour market performance. We outline a means of quantifying the extent of any disparity, (polarisation), in the signals stemming from individual and household-based measures of worklessness and apply this index to data from 5 countries over 25 years. Built around a comparison of the actual household workless rate with that which would occur if employment were randomly distributed over household occupants, we show that in all the countries we examine, there has been a growing disparity between the individual and household based workless measures. The polarisation count can be decomposed to identify which household groups are exposed to workless concentrations and can also be used to test which individual characteristics account for any excess worklessness among these household groups. We show that the incidence and magnitude of polarisation varies widely across countries, but that in all countries polarisation has increased. For each country most of the discrepancies between the individual and household workless counts stem from within-household factors, rather than from changing household composition

Demographic responses to short-term stress in a 19^th century Tuscan population: the case of household out-migration

This paper deals with the relationship between household emigration and short-term crisis in a rural community of mid-19th century Tuscany. Based on a detailed reconstruction of individual and household life-histories, the paper shows the close relationship between household emigration and different kinds of short-term stresses, either economic, epidemiologic or within the household. Despite the different response by SES - with the poorest strata of the population much exposed to price changes and mortality crisis - the death of the household head appears as one of the most powerful factor of household emigration

Confronting the Robinson Crusoe paradigm with household-size heterogeneity

Modern macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind economic actions by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. This analytical approach requires that incentives of the poor and the rich are strictly aligned. In empirical analysis a challenging complication is that consumer and income data are typically available at the household level, and individuals living in multimember households have the potential to share goods within the household. The analytical approach of modern macroeconomics would require that intra-household sharing is also strictly aligned across the rich and the poor. Here we have designed a survey method that allows the testing of this stringent property of intra-household sharing and find that it holds: once expenditures for basic needs are subtracted from disposable household income, household-size economies implied by the remainder household incomes are the same for the rich and the poor