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Working Paper
Inequality in Comprehensive Wealth
We create an annualized measure of comprehensive household wealth using the 1998–2022 waves of the Health and Retirement Study and examine heterogeneity in retirement resources across households, cohorts, and time. We augment traditional net worth with the actuarial present values of expected future payment streams from labor-market earnings, Social Security, defined-benefit pensions, annuities, life insurance, and government transfers. We then calculate an annualized measure of that lump sum by converting it into an actuarially fair joint life annuity that we call annualized comprehensive ...