12 Jan 2022

SAFE launches new “household barometer” on household financial data

Panel provides insights into the economic situation of private households in real-time via a data trusteeship

Andreas Hackethal, director of the Household Finance research department at the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE, and his team are developing a new “household barometer” (“Haushaltsbarometer”) that provides detailed real-time insights into the economic situation of private households. Designed as a representative sample, citizens in Germany can use the household barometer to store their private financial data in encrypted form via a neutral, non-commercial data trust within the standards of the EU’s Data Governance Act (DGA) and make it usable for various value-added services, as well as make it available to third parties in a pseudonymized form and upon revocation.

“By building, maintaining, and querying a household panel in real-time, we can create a new type of data basis for research, the public, and politics, from which better macroeconomic and microeconomic solutions can be drawn, from which companies can also benefit,” explains Andreas Hackethal. By making the data available according to DGA, the information it contains can be used and evaluated, while at the same time ensuring the highest standards of data protection and data security.

Subprojects on private financial and central bank data

With the household barometer, SAFE researcher Hackethal takes over the leadership for a subproject in the international consortium EuroDaT, which is based on the Gaia-X initiative to enable a European data infrastructure. EuroDaT is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action for two years. These funds will be used to set up the data trust EuroDaT Operations, which will ensure the protected exchange of data.

Another sub-project in the EuroDat consortium is running under the title „Provision of data for research purposes using the example of monetary policy issues“, which is led by SAFE Fellows Maik Schmeling, Professor of Finance at Goethe University Frankfurt, and Rainer Haselmann, Professor of Financial Economics at Goethe University Frankfurt. The project aims to make central bank data accessible for data fiduciary research. It aims to investigate for the first time the effects of monetary policy shocks on the decisions of individual households, banks, and financial market participants and to gain new insights into the distributional effects of monetary policy.

Further information on the GAIA-X funding competition (in German)


Scientific contact

Prof. Dr. Andreas Hackethal

Coordinator Pension Finance Lab