The household sector is both a propagator of shocks to the economy, as wealth is
redistributed across households with differing propensities to consume, and an originator of risky
claims held in systemically important places, as losses are shifted from households to creditors
such as financial institutions. Information about these exposures, like information generally, is
conveyed by prices and so is under-produced by markets. Thus increased public collection,
analysis, and distribution of information on household exposures to macroeconomic risk factors
can potentially lead to better macroeconomic performance, both through better informed private
decision-making and through better public policy.
This note describes a system for monitoring, measuring and publicizing exposures to and
from the household sector. This system, called the LEADS system, is designed to provide market
participants, regulators, and households with additional information to understand the
reallocation of resources within, from, and to the household sector in response to macroeconomic
events. The LEADS system has three components, of which the first is the main focus of this
paper. The first step is the collection of data on LEADS – Liabilities, Earnings, Assets,
Demographics, and financial Sophistication – at the household level. I argue that these
categories are the key dimensions to measure, that measurement at the household-level is critical
for accurate measurement, and that much of this information is available in institutions already
subject to government oversight and reporting requirements. The second step in LEADS is the
measurement of the exposure of each asset, each liability, and each income stream to
macroeconomic risk factors. This step is the subject of much of the field and practice of finance,
and describing the vast and evolving set of techniques for this step is beyond this paper. This
component of the system requires historical data on returns (at a minimum) and modeling of
future exposures.
The final step is analysis and release of information. I propose analysis of the outcomes
of changes in risk factors in four important dimensions: the distributional impacts on both liquid
wealth and lifetime wealth; the resultant changes in household demand; the effects of balance
sheet adjustments on the prices and payouts of claims on the household sector held by other
sectors; and the resulting impact on the revenues and liabilities of the government, through