Does wealth affect consumption? Evidence for Italy

This paper analyzes the dynamics of Italian households' net worth over the 1990s and assesses the strength of the wealth effects on consumption, using as a benchmark the United States. Overall, wealth effects in Italy appear to be small and unlikely to be direct. Financial wealth effects have been small because Italian households are not large scale owners of financial assets, even though their marginal propensity to consume out of financial wealth lies close to that reported for the US. By contrast, housing market effects have been small, despite widespread homeownership, because the marginal propensity to consume out of real assets is very low.