Net Wealth across the Euroarea- Why household structure matters and how to control for it. PRELIMINARY AND INCOMPLETE DRAFT∗

We study the link between household structure and cross country differences in the wealth distribution using a recently compiled household dataset for the euroarea (HFCS). We estimate counterfactual distributions using non-parametric reweighting to examine the extent to which differences in the unconditional distributions of wealth across euroarea countries can be explained by differences in household structure. We find that imposing a common household structure has strong effects on both the full unconditional distributions as well as its mappings to different inequality measures. For the median 50 % of the differences are explained for Austria, 15 % fo