Add net_wealth variable and mortgage_debt / consumer_debt inputs#1761
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Add net_wealth variable and mortgage_debt / consumer_debt inputs#1761MaxGhenis wants to merge 1 commit into
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net_wealth is total_wealth less mortgage, consumer, and student-loan debt. Unlike gross total_wealth (property + corporate + savings, never negative), net wealth can be negative when a household's debts exceed its assets, so it ranks the genuinely underwater households into the bottom of the wealth distribution. mortgage_debt and consumer_debt are new household inputs imputed by policyengine-uk-data from the Wealth and Assets Survey. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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What
Adds a
net_wealthhousehold variable and themortgage_debtandconsumer_debtinputs that feed it.net_wealth=total_wealth−mortgage_debt−consumer_debt− householdstudent_loan_balance.mortgage_debt(gross outstanding mortgage) andconsumer_debt(non-mortgage, non-student-loan borrowing) are new household inputs.Why
Gross
total_wealth(property + corporate + savings) has no liabilities netted out, so it is never negative. That makes the bottom of the wealth distribution an artefact: ~13% of households own no property/savings and pile up at exactly £0, leaving the lowest wealth decile empty and hiding the genuinely underwater households (debts > assets).net_wealthputs those households where they belong — the bottom of the distribution — so distributional analysis by wealth reflects reality.total_wealthis left unchanged (the web app's percentage wealth-change charts rely on it staying non-negative).Companion
The
mortgage_debt/consumer_debtinputs are imputed from the Wealth and Assets Survey by a companion policyengine-uk-data PR. Until a dataset release carries them, both default to 0 (sonet_wealth==total_wealth).Tests
policyengine_uk/tests/policy/baseline/household/wealth/net_wealth.yamlcovers the subtraction, a negative-net-wealth case, and the no-debt case.