Stockholding: A European Comparison

Abstract

The 1990s witnessed significant increases in stock market participation by households, both in Europe and in the United States. This participation took the form both of direct involvement in stock market trading of individual stocks and of indirect stockholding through participation in managed investment accounts. By the end of the 1990s, 17.3 per cent of the households in five major European countries (France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) were holding stocks directly. Direct participation was highest in the United Kingdom (27.9 per cent) and lowest in Italy (7.9 per cent), with values for France, Germany and the Netherlands in the 15–17 per cent range. Including indirect stockownership through mutual funds sets the overall stock market participation at 23 per cent for France, 15 per cent for Italy, 20 per cent for Germany, 33 per cent in the Netherlands, and almost 50 per cent in the United Kingdom and the United States.

We are grateful to the Observatoire de l’Epargne Européenne for its generous support of the project, and to all project participants (Luc Arrondel, James Banks, Axel Börsch-Supan, Lothar Essig, Stefan Hochguertel, Andrè Masson, Raffaele Miniaci, Matt Wakefield, and Guglielmo Weber) for their work on individual country data on which many of our remarks in this chapter are based.