Search Results
Journal Article
The current state of U.S. household balance sheets
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is responsible for two of the most widely used datasets containing information about U.S. household balance sheets: the quarterly macro-level Financial Accounts of the United States (FA, formerly known as the Flow of Funds Accounts) and the triennial microlevel Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). The FA is very timely, but the data can be used only to describe the household sector as a whole. The SCF provides the micro-level detail needed to capture heterogeneity in household finances, but the data are available only with a long lag. The ...
Discussion Paper
Which Households Have Negative Wealth?
At some point in its life a household’s total debt may exceed its total assets, in which case it has “negative wealth.” Even if this status is temporary, it may affect the household’s ability to save for durable goods, restrict access to further credit, and may require living in a state of limited consumption. Detailed analysis of the holdings of negative-wealth households, however, is a topic that has received little attention. In particular, relatively little is known about the characteristics of such households or about what drives negative wealth. A better understanding of these ...
Journal Article
Consumers and the economy, part I: Household credit and personal saving
In the years since the bursting of the housing bubble, the personal saving rate has trended up from around 1% to around 6%, while the ratio of household debt to disposable income has dropped from 130% to 118%. Changes over time in the availability of credit to households can explain 90% of the variance of the saving rate since the mid-1960s, including the recent uptrend, according to a simple empirical model.
Journal Article
Consumers and the economy, part II: Household debt and the weak U.S. recovery
The U.S. economic recovery has been weak, especially in employment growth. A microeconomic analysis of U.S. counties shows that this weakness is closely related to elevated levels of household debt accumulated during the housing boom. Counties where household debt grew moderately from 2002 to 2006 have seen a moderation of employment losses and a robust recovery in durable consumption and residential investment. By contrast, counties that experienced large increases in household debt during the boom have been mired in a severe recessionary environment even after the official end of the ...
Journal Article
Consumer debt and the economic recovery
A key ingredient of an economic recovery is a pickup in household spending supported by increased consumer debt. As the current economic recovery has struggled to take hold, household debt levels have grown little. Some evidence indicates that households adjusted debt in line with house price movements in their local markets. However, the data show that consumer debt cutbacks were largest among households that defaulted on mortgages or had lower credit scores, suggesting that household borrowing also was restricted by tight aggregate credit supply.
Working Paper
Racial profiling or racist policing? bounds tests in aggregate data
State-wide reports on police traffic stops and searches summarize very large populations, making them potentially powerful tools for identifying racial bias, particularly when statistics on search outcomes are included. But when the reported statistics conflate searches involving different levels of police discretion, standard tests for racial bias are not applicable. This paper develops a model of police search decisions that allows for non-discretionary searches and derives tests for racial bias in data that mixes different search types. Our tests reject unbiased policing as an explanation ...
Working Paper
Why do education vouchers fail at the ballot box?
We compare a uniform voucher regime against the status quo mix of public and private education, focusing on the distribution of welfare gains and losses across house- holds by income. We argue that the topping-up option available under uniform vouchers is not sufficiently valuable for the poorer households, so the voucher regime is defeated at the polls. Our result depends critically on the opting-out feature in the current system.
Working Paper
Retail CBDC and U.S. Monetary Policy Implementation: A Stylized Balance Sheet Analysis
This paper discusses how a Federal Reserve issued retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) could affect U.S. monetary policy implementation. Using a stylized balance sheet analysis, we analyze the effect a retail CBDC could have on the balance sheets of the Federal Reserve, commercial banks, and U.S. households. Then we consider how these balance sheet changes could affect monetary policy implementation for the Federal Reserve. We illustrate that the potential effects on monetary policy implementation from a retail CBDC are highly dependent on the initial conditions of the Federal ...
Working Paper
Are household surveys like tax forms: evidence from income underreporting of the self-employed
There is a large literature showing that the self-employed underreport their income to tax authorities. In this paper, we quantify the extent to which the self-employed also systematically underreport their income in U.S. household surveys. To do so, we use the Engel curve describing the relationship between income and expenditures of wage and salary workers to infer the actual income, and thus the reporting gap, of the self-employed based on their reported expenditures. We find that the self-employed underreport their income by about 30 percent. This result is remarkably robust across data ...
Journal Article
Households during the Great Recession: the financial accelerator in action?
Households are the sector that the financial accelerator appears to have hit hardest, according to the data.