Search Results
Journal Article
Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2013 to 2016: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances
Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances The Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances for 2016 provides insights into the evolution of family income and net worth since the previous time the survey was conducted, in 2013. The survey shows that, over the 2013-16 period, the median value of real (inflation-adjusted) family income before taxes rose 10 percent, and mean income increased 14 percent. Real median net worth increased 16 percent, and mean net worth increased 26 percent. The data also indicate that gains in income and net worth are broad based, occurring across many ...
Discussion Paper
Are Disappearing Employer Pensions Contributing to Rising Wealth Inequality?
Focusing our attention on families close to retirement, we consider the interplay between employer-sponsored retirement wealth and Social Security.
Working Paper
The COVID-19 Pandemic and Family Economic Well-being: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances
The COVID-19 pandemic caused severe disruptions to the U.S. labor market and economic activity. We establish connections between family experiences of the pandemic, their income under normal conditions, and their later economic well-being using the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances. By their interview, one-third of families experienced net employment declines, one-third had teleworked, and one-fifth had significant COVID-19-related health events. These experiences strongly reflected families’ positions in the income distribution, with lower-income families bearing the brunt. They also ...
Working Paper
On Intergenerational Immobility : Evidence that Adult Credit Health Reflects the Childhood Environment
Using a novel dataset that links socioeconomic background to future credit, postsecondary education, and federal student loan and grant records, we document that, even though it is not and cannot be used by credit agencies in assigning risk, background is a strong predictor of adult credit health. A relationship remains upon inclusion of achievement, attainment, and debt management metrics. These findings reveal a new dimension along which childhood circumstances persist into adulthood and imply that the many important contexts in which credit scores are relied upon to evaluate individuals ...
Working Paper
How does Social Security claiming respond to incentives? considering husbands' and wives' benefits separately
A majority of women receive most of their Social Security benefits based upon their husbands' earnings history, but previous research has shown that husbands' benefit claiming is inconsistent with maximizing lifetime benefits for the couple. However, that research assumes husbands choose their claim age based on all Social Security incentives facing the household. I show that husbands' claiming behavior responds to the actuarial incentives built into their own retired worker benefit formula, but not to the incentives built into the spouse and survivor formulas that determine their wives' ...
Working Paper
The Evolution of Retirement Wealth
Is the current mix of tax preferences for employer-sponsored pensions and individual retirement saving in the U.S. delivering the best possible retirement-preparedness across and within generations? Using data from the triennial Survey of Consumer Finances for 1989 through 2013, cohort-based analysis of life-cycle trajectories shows that (1) overall retirement plan participation was relatively stable or even rising through 2007, though participation fell noticeably in the wake of the Great Recession and has remained lower, (2) participation is strongly correlated with income, and the shift in ...
Discussion Paper
Updating the Distributional Financial Accounts
In addition to incorporating 2020q2 data from the Financial Accounts, the 2020q2 release of the Distributional Financial Accounts (DFAs) includes three substantial updates. The most consequential is the incorporation of the newly released 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF).
Discussion Paper
A Note On Revolving Credit Estimates
Revolving credit represents a notable share of consumer debt and is an important part of house- hold balance sheets. At the end of 2023, revolving credit was measured at over $1.3 trillion in the Z.1 Statistical Release, "Financial Accounts of the United States," and accounted for more than 25 per- cent of total consumer credit.
Working Paper
Are homeowners in denial about their house values? comparing owner perceptions with transaction-based indexes
The boom and bust of the housing market has been a prominent feature of the household financial landscape in recent years. The exact magnitude of the house price swings depends on whether you ask homeowners how much their houses are worth at two points in time or use the change in a transaction-based house price index (HPI). During the boom, owner-reported values rose much more rapidly than the HPI, and after the bust, owner-reported values fell slightly less than the HPI. Individual homeowner "errors" are estimated to explain about one-third of the different in aggregate changes in the ...
Working Paper
Updates to the Sampling of Wealthy Families in the Survey of Consumer Finances
Participation in household surveys has fallen over time, making it harder to produce a household survey-like the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF)-in a timely manner. To address these challenges, the reference year of the sampling frame data for the 2016 SCF wealthy oversample was shifted back one year, allowing the oversample to be selected earlier than the past. In implementing this change, though, we risk identifying an outdated set of families and introducing variability in the sampling process. However, we show that the set of families selected in the new frame are observationally ...