IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oec/wiseaa/37-en.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Mapping trends and gaps in household wealth across OECD countries

Author

Listed:
  • Carlotta Balestra

    (OECD)

  • Jakub Caisl

    (European Commission)

  • Luiz Hermida

    (OECD)

Abstract

This paper builds on previous OECD research to analyse medium-term and recent trends in household wealth and highlight potential implications for inequality of opportunity. While household net wealth increased, and wealth inequality declined during the late 2010s, experimental evidence based on Distributional Wealth Accounts (DWA) offers mixed findings on how these trends have evolved amid the cost-of-living crisis. The paper then focuses on homeownership, usually a key pathway for wealth accumulation, and finds that rising house prices have made it increasingly difficult for young and low-wealth households to enter the housing market, a trend that could exacerbate wealth disparities. The analysis also highlights significant wealth gaps across different demographic groups, particularly between younger and older generations, as well as disparities linked to gender, migrant status, and geographic location.

Suggested Citation

  • Carlotta Balestra & Jakub Caisl & Luiz Hermida, 2025. "Mapping trends and gaps in household wealth across OECD countries," OECD Papers on Well-being and Inequalities 37, OECD Publishing.
    • Handle: RePEc:oec:wiseaa:37-en
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    household portfolio; housing; inequality; wealth accumulation; wealth distribution;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D14 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Saving; Personal Finance
    • D15 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Intertemporal Household Choice; Life Cycle Models and Saving
    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • G51 - Financial Economics - - Household Finance - - - Household Savings, Borrowing, Debt, and Wealth

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oec:wiseaa:37-en. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask the person in charge to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.oecd.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.