The Household Wealth Distribution in Spain: The Role of Housing and Financial Wealth". ECINEQ Working Papers No. 83

We analyze the distribution of household wealth in Spain using the \u85rst wave of the Spanish Survey of Household Finances conducted by the Bank of Spain in 2002. We study the distribution of the di¤erent wealth components and, using in-equality decomposition techniques, we assess the contribution of each element to overall wealth inequality. We \u85nd that wealth is more unequally distributed than income, while housing wealth is much more evenly distributed than \u85nancial wealth. Initially, the results regarding the contribution of housing wealth to wealth inequal-ity are contradictory. However, once we impose the uniform additions property proposed by Morduch and Sicular (2002) to be satis\u85ed, our results suggest that housing wealth contributes negatively to wealth inequality. This contribution is the result of two opposite forces: while gross housing contributes to reduce inequality, housing debt contributes to increase it. Finally, \u85 nancial wealth is a disequalizing factor whatever the decomposition rule considered