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Wealth and Its Distribution: A Look at Asian American Households in 2022
Asian Americans typically had more wealth than other racial or ethnic groups, and that wealth was spread across a diverse range of financial and nonfinancial assets.
Working Paper
The Geography of Wealth: Shocks, Mobility and Precautionary Savings
The spatial distribution of wealth in the United States is very heterogeneous. We study the spatial distribution of wealth in a country and how it is shaped by regional earning characteristics and mobility frictions. For this, we develop a tractable model of consumption, savings and location choice with many regions, incomplete markets and heterogeneous agents facing persistent and transitory income shocks. Our theory extends a workhorse macroeconomic model of consumption and savings under uncertainty to an economy with multiple labor markets and costly mobility. Despite complex spatial and ...
Report
Demographics of Wealth 2018, Essay No. 3: The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall: The Decline of the White Working Class
This essay explores the intersection of race, ethnicity and education, which we use as a proxy for class. We examine five measures of well-being between 1989 and 2016, the range spanned by the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances.
Single Mothers Face Difficulties with Slim Financial Cushions
During the COVID-19 recession, single mothers faced high unemployment and were more likely to exit the labor force than single fathers and women without children.
Report
The Demographics of Wealth 2018, Essay No. 1: The Financial Returns from College across Generations: Large but Unequal
This essay explores the connections between a person's level of completed education and measures of his or her family's financial well-being, including income and wealth. For simplicity, we examine two discrete groups—families headed by someone who has completed a four-year college degree or higher ("college grads") and those without a college graduate head ("nongrads"). This essay shows that inherited demographic characteristics significantly influence the expected income and wealth outcomes associated with one's own education. These characteristics include birth year (and hence age at the ...
Working Paper
Do the Rich Really Save More? Answering an Old Question Using the Survey of Consumer Finances with Direct Measures of Lifetime Earnings and an Expanded Wealth Concept
The question of whether affluent households save at a higher rate than other parts of the distribution has been asked by economists on numerous occasions since the 1950s. It is standard in this research to define affluent, or “rich,” households as those with high lifetime earnings or income to better ground the empirical question in relevant theory. However, results in the literature are mixed regarding whether rich households in fact save more than others, with some studies suggesting a generally flat saving-rate profile across the distribution and others supporting the notion that the ...
Discussion Paper
Recent Disparities in Earnings and Employment
The New York Fed recently released its latest set of Equitable Growth Indicators (EGIs). Updated quarterly, the EGIs continue to report demographic and geographic differences in inflation, earnings (real and nominal), employment, and consumer spending (real and nominal) at the national level. This release also launches a set of national wealth EGIs (which will be examined more closely on Liberty Street Economics early next year). Going forward, EGI releases will also include a set of regional EGIs, which will present disparities in inflation, earnings (real and nominal), employment, and ...
How Financially Fit Are American Retirees?
From 1989 to 2016, the wealth of retired households increased in real terms. But data also indicated that wealth inequality worsened among retirees.
Discussion Paper
Wealth Inequality by Age in the Post‑Pandemic Era
Following our post on racial and ethnic wealth gaps, here we turn to the distribution of wealth across age groups, focusing on how the picture has changed since the beginning of the pandemic. As of 2019, individuals under 40 years old held just 4.9 percent of total U.S. wealth despite comprising 37 percent of the adult population. Conversely, individuals over age 54 made up a similar share of the population and held 71.6 percent of total wealth. Since 2019, we find a slight narrowing of these wealth disparities across age groups, likely driven by expanded ownership of financial assets among ...
Millennials Are Catching Up in Terms of Generational Wealth
From 2016 to 2019, millennials born in the 1980s became relatively wealthier, though they still lagged in relation to wealth expectations.