Missing the wealthy in the HFCS: micro problems with macro implications

Author:

Waltl Sofie R.ORCID,Chakraborty Robin

Abstract

AbstractWealth aggregates implied by the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) usually yield much lower amounts than macroeconomic statistics reported in the National Accounts. An important source of this gap may be the under-representation of the wealthiest households in the HFCS. This article therefore combines a semi-parametric Pareto model estimated from top survey data and observations from rich lists with a non-parametric stratification approach to quantify the impact of the missing wealthy households on component-specific micro-macro gaps. We find that unadjusted micro data substantially underestimates wealth inequality. The largest effects are documented for equity. For other components, the missing wealthy explain less than ten percentage points of the micro-macro gap. We find that differences in oversampling strategies limit the cross-country comparability of unadjusted survey-implied wealth distributions and that our top tail adjustment leads to measures that are internationally better comparable.

Funder

Vienna University of Economics and Business

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Subject

Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management,General Economics, Econometrics and Finance,Sociology and Political Science

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