The Household Finance and Consumption Network (HFCN), established in December 2006, consists of survey experts, statisticians and economists from the ECB, the Eurosystem national central banks and a number of national statistical institutes and research institutes. The Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) conducted by this network will collect household-level data on household finances and consumption.
The HFCN has been mandated by the ECB's Governing Council to
The network is chaired by Caroline Willeke and Michael Ehrmann (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 will collect household-level data on household finances and consumption. The first wave of the HFCS will be conducted at national level between early 2009 and 2010. We intend, in the future, to make anonymised euro area micro data available to the research community.
The HFCS will cover the following household characteristics at micro level:
The HFCS will be conducted at national level. In view of the considerable cultural and institutional differences between euro area countries, some flexibility in formulating the questions for each country is needed in order to obtain comparable data. Countries can then aim for harmonisation in terms of survey output but will not necessarily use identical questionnaires.
Countries will report a set of output variables which have been commonly agreed on. Firstly, so-called ‘core’ output variables are to be delivered by all participating countries. In addition, a set of non-core variables has been defined. Countries can freely decide which of the non-core variables to collect. T he collection of standardised variables will ensure cross-country comparability. The HFCN had also developed a blue-print questionnaire to be used primarily by the countries implementing the HFCS for the first time.
The HFCS questionnaire consists of two main parts:
In addition, there are standardised questions to determine the respondent responsible for the household questionnaire, ‘the financially knowledgeable person’, and also questions to be answered by the interviewer on the appearance and location of the dwelling and the interviewees’ behaviour during the interview. This will provide the so-called ‘para-data’
The main aim of the Eurosystem HFCS is to gather micro-level structural information on households’ assets and liabilities in the euro area. In addition, the survey will collect other information in order to analyse the economic decisions taken by households.
Survey data are a key to
Currently, research results in the field of household finance and consumption are only available for few countries. On account of the differences from country to country, be they related to the institutional settings or the types of shock, results obtained for one economy cannot be easily generalised. A lack of comparable data prevents analyses being made for the euro area as a whole.
Gathering information on the behaviour of sub-groups of the population is essential. For instance, the recent financial crisis has demonstrated that a relatively small fraction of households – those highly indebted – can have a major impact on market outcomes. Another example of an influential sub-group would be the wealthiest households. Though small in number, they have a highly disproportionate effect on the aggregate statistics.
