Household Wealth Portfolios in Luxembourg in a Comparative Perspective - WEALTHPORT
Institution
CEPS / INSTEAD
Du : 01/03/2010
Au : 28/02/2012
Budget : 366 000,00€
Contact(s) :
Sierminska Eva
Summary
With private assets playing an ever larger role in buffering life uncertainties as rich economies have been experiencing a shift of risk from the State to the households brought about by restraining welfare states and falling job security, there has been a renewed interest in the study and measurement of wealth.
The aim of this proposal is to carry out research in the area of wealth portfolio and wealth distribution analysis in Luxembourg in a cross-national perspective by exploiting a unique source of newly collected survey data among Luxembourg residents (PSELL-3/EUSILC 2008). The project has one technical chapter and two substantive chapters.
The technical part will involve processing the raw survey data collected in the field in 2008 (incl. detailed treatment of partial non-response and measurement error) and harmonization according to the LWS model. In the first substantive chapter, we will study the size and distribution of wealth (‘net worth’ -- assets minus debts) and will analyze the joint distribution of income and wealth in order to measure the extent to which the latter can substitute for the former to provide economic security. We study whether accounting for wealth and income jointly reveals a different pattern of social inequality than the traditional income-based approach. In the second substantive chapter, we will examine the wealth portfolio composition in the country.
The specific purpose of this analysis will be to assess the vulnerability of the population living in Luxembourg in the face of the financial crisis. Emphasis is put on potentially vulnerable populations by age, immigrant status and gender. Throughout the project, cross-national comparisons based on the Luxembourg Wealth Study will help put our results in an international perspective. In addition to providing policy findings, our research will make methodological progress. In particular, we will extend existing methods of distributional analysis to incorporate particular characteristics of wealth data (extreme and negative values, zeroes, high skewness of the data) and we will propose a new statistical model for the joint distribution of income and wealth.