Asset ownership of the elderly across Europe: A multilevel latent class analysis to segment countries and households

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.