Abstract
Wealth is a useful measure of the socio-economic status of the elderly, because it might reflect both accumulated socio-economic position and potential for current consumption. A growing number of papers have studied household portfolio in old age, both from a financial point of view (i.e. in the framework of the life-cycle model) and from a marketing perspective. In this chapter, we aim at providing new evidence on this issue both at the household and country level, by investigating similarities and differences in the ownership patterns of several financial and real assets among elderly in Europe. To do so, we exploit the richness of information provided by SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe), an international survey on ageing that collects detailed information on several aspects of the socio-economic condition of the European elderly. Given the hierarchical structure of the data, the econometric solution we adopt is a multilevel latent class analysis, which allows us to obtain simultaneously country and household segments.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Dimitri Christelis and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. This chapter uses data from SHARE wave 2 release 2.3.1, as of July 28, 2010. The SHARE data collection has been primarily funded by the European Commission through the 5th framework programme (project QLK6-CT-2001-00360 in the thematic programme Quality of Life), through the 6th framework programme (projects SHARE-I3, RII-CT-2006-062193, COMPARE, CIT5-CT-2005-028857, and SHARELIFE, CIT4-CT-2006-028812) and through the 7th framework programme (SHARE-PREP, 211909 and SHARE-LEAP, 227822). Additional funding from the U.S. National Institute on Aging (U01 AG09740-13S2, P01 AG005842, P01 AG08291, P30 AG12815, Y1-AG-4553-01 and OGHA 04-064, IAG BSR06-11, R21 AG025169) as well as from various national sources is gratefully acknowledged (see http://www.share-project.org for a full list of funding institutions).
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Paccagnella, O., Varriale, R. (2013). Asset Ownership of the Elderly Across Europe: A Multilevel Latent Class Analysis to Segment Countries and Households. In: Torelli, N., Pesarin, F., Bar-Hen, A. (eds) Advances in Theoretical and Applied Statistics. Studies in Theoretical and Applied Statistics(). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35588-2_35
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35588-2_35
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