The Household Finance and Consumption Network (HFCN), which was established in December 2006, consists of survey specialists, statisticians and economists from the ECB, the national central banks of the Eurosystem and a number of national statistical institutes. The HFCN conducts the Eurosystem’s Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), which collects household-level data on households’ finances and consumption. The HFCN plans to make anonymised data available to the research community in early 2013.
The HFCN has been tasked by the Governing Council of the ECB with:
The HFCN is chaired by Ioannis Ganoulis and Frank Smets (both ECB). Its secretaries are Carlos Sánchez Muñoz and Jiri Slacalek (both ECB).
You can get in touch with us by writing to hfcs@ecb.europa.eu
The HFCS collects household-level data on households’ finances and consumption. The HFCS is conducted at the national level, with the fieldwork for the first survey taking place in late 2010/early 2011 in most countries. The HFCN plans to provide the research community with anonymised microdata on the euro area in early 2013.
The HFCS covers the following characteristics of households at the micro level:
The HFCS is conducted at the national level. In view of the considerable cultural and institutional differences between euro area countries, there needs to be some flexibility in the formulation of the questions for the individual countries in order to obtain comparable data. Countries produce harmonised output (i.e. survey data), but do not necessarily use identical questionnaires. However, a common template questionnaire serves as a benchmark for countries’ questionnaires, as well as establishing the output desired.
Countries will report a set of commonly agreed output variables. "Core" output variables are to be delivered by all participating countries. A set of non-core variables has also been defined, with countries free to decide which of these non-core variables they collect and report. The collection of standardised variables will ensure cross-country comparability. As mentioned above, the HFCN has also developed a template questionnaire .
The HFCS questionnaire consists of two main parts:
In addition, there are standardised questions to determine the respondent responsible for the questions on the household as a whole (the "financially knowledgeable person"), as well as questions to be answered by the interviewer relating to the appearance and location of the house/flat and the interviewees’ behaviour during the interview. This will provide “paradata”, which are particularly useful when editing and imputing data after the fieldwork has been completed.
The main aim of the HFCS is to gather micro-level structural information on euro area households’ assets and liabilities. The survey also collects other information in order to analyse the economic decisions taken by households.
Survey data are key to:
More specifically, the following questions in the field of household finance may be of particular interest to policy-makers.
Currently, the results of research in the field of household finance and consumption are available only for a few countries. Given the differences between countries – whether related to institutional arrangements or specific economic circumstances – general conclusions cannot easily be drawn on the basis of results for one economy. A lack of comparable data currently prevents any analysis from being carried out for the euro area as a whole.
Gathering information on the behaviour of sub-sections of the population is essential. For instance, the financial crisis has demonstrated that a relatively small percentage of households – those who are highly indebted – can have a major impact on market outcomes. Another example of an influential sub-group is the very wealthiest households. Though small in number, these have a highly disproportionate effect on aggregate statistics.
