This paper studies the long-run housing and financial wealth effects on consumption in Italy and in the UK, taking into consideration the recent period of financial crisis.
The impact of the crisis on the two countries was different, mainly due to their distinctive financial systems, which crucially account for the strength of wealth effects. The impact in the UK was faster and more intensive due to a higher exposure to the US stock market, and the high level of indebtedness of UK households. By contrast, Italy observed a less dramatic impact, though the recession is still in place.
This paper contributes to the empirical literature in some respects. First, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to thoroughly compare wealth effects in Italy and the UK using macro data. To this end, we estimate marginal propensities to consume out of wealth components over the period 1972–2012, using two different estimation methods: the DOLS estimator by Stock and Watson (1993) and the method proposed by Carroll, Otsuka, and Slacalek (2011). Second, we carried out a rolling analysis to investigate how wealth effects evolved over the examined period, with a particular focus on the recent period of financial crisis.
The empirical results over the entire sample show that: i) housing wealth plays no role in Italy, whereas it is significant in the UK; and ii) in both countries, the financial wealth exerts a positive and significant impact on aggregate consumption. As for the rolling analysis, both estimation methods show: i) an insignificant effect of housing wealth for Italy over time, as opposed to a slight increasing trend for the effect of financial wealth; and ii) a declining trend for the financial wealth effect in the UK, along with a relatively increasing trend for the housing wealth effect, in large part of the examined period.