Holdings Of Equity By Households In Austria Derived From Register Data – Compilation And Analytical Use OECD Working Party on Financial Statistics Paris, Based on a paper by Michael Andreasch, Pirmin Fessler and Martin Schürz Presented by Michael Andreasch

Outline Motivation Data (Data sources), Definitions and Compilation Results for Individuals Comparison Survey Data and Register Data

Work has been elaborated against the background … To date, research on household wealth has seldom focused on households´ business equity holdings Micro data allow both the compilation of macro data in the framework of financial accounts data and the analysis of distribution of wealth based on equity holdings Find a better understanding on the financial behaviour of companies determined by holdings of households

The Distribution Of (Other) Equity In Austrian Companies 3% of households own other equity Other Equity: 6% of total financial assets in comparison to: 10-15% hold securities 53% have life insurance contracts nearly 100% have saving accounts in comparison to: 22% are securities 14% are life insurance contracts 44% are saving accounts

Importance of Equity From the perspective of distribution: Such equity holdings are highly concentrated even within this group of investor households, who are characterised by above-average income and wealth In view of the tightened refinancing conditions: A comprehensive grasp on equity proves particularly relevant

Equity Holdings In The Financial Accounts Data Data Sources Holdings of listed and unlisted shares: Securities by securities information system based on custodian reports of domestic banks and direct reporting by end-investors (alternatively) Other equity holdings (limited liability companies): Company Register information on all enterprises including nominal capital and distribution of holdings of owners as well as characteristics (like industry, place…) Commercial data base on individual capital components and other important items of the balance sheet 

Compilation Linkage of these data sources via the Company Register number Calculation of the nominal to total equity ratio for each company (even if it is negative) Equally distributed among all holders For equity stakes that are recorded in the Company Register only: we use the nominal capital For equity that is recorded in the commercial database only: exclusion from the compilation.

Data On Equity In Austrian Limited Liability Companies 1 Individuals o 128,353 equity stakes traceable to individuals o 105,471 persons in the data set o Average value of equity stakes: EUR 144,722 o Median value of equity stakes: EUR 17,850 1 Data derived from the results of 2005.

Distribution of Total Equity Stakes of Individuals 1 o We sum up all equity stakes of an individual o Mean: 176,084 Euro ; Median: 19,350 Euro o Around 14% with negative values o Around 5% with values over 500,000 Euro representing 82% of the total volume o Around 2,5% with values over 1 Million Euro o Top Values of more than one billion Euro 1 Data derived from the results of 2005.

Motivation – In View Of The Ongoing Work Towards HFCS

Comparison with Survey Data – Descriptives o Extremely low share of business equity interests o No precise estimation possible(n=59) o But how well is distrbution covered by the few observations resulting from the survey?

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