by Olympia Bover,a Martin Schürz,b Jiri Slacalekc and Federica Teppad
The following three articles summarize the evidence on assets, liabilities, and saving of households from fifteen European countries from a new data set, the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Before the articles expose the more detailed analytical results, this introductory note gives an overview of the data set and describes how it expands our information about household balance sheets. In addition, we provide some key summary statistics on holdings of assets and liabilities that document heterogeneity along sociodemographic and country dimensions. Finally, we preview the main findings from the three papers.
Full article (PDF, 13 pages, 208 kb)
a Banco de España
b Oesterreichische Nationalbank
c European Central Bank
d De Nederlandsche Bank and Netspar