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This paper investigates the strength of the wealth effect across countries. The author uses a variety of methods and finds evidence of significant wealth effects in the United Kingdom and Canada of a size similar to that in the United States, reflecting the importance of equities in aggregate household wealth in these countries. In Japan, a significant wealth effect is also evident, but since household wealth has changed little on balance in Japan in recent years, this channel has been less significant in explaining Japanese consumption growth in the second half of the 1990s. In the major continental European countries since 1995, equities remain a less important form of household wealth in most of these countries, and the consumption response to changes in wealth remains limited. In some smaller European countries where equity issuance is more frequent, the emerging evidence suggests that wealth effects may be more important. This working paper can be found at the United States Federal Reserve Board's International Finance Discussion Papers. You can access it by going to http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/.