Search Results
How Young Adults’ Homeownership Differs Across Generations
St. Louis Fed economist Victoria Gregory discusses her research on wealth, homeownership and location patterns for young adults from the baby boom to Gen Z.
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.
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.
Working Paper
The geography of wealth: shocks, mobility, and precautionary savings
The spatial distribution of wealth in the United States is very heterogeneous, with important differences within and across US states. We study the distribution of wealth in a country and how it is shaped by the characteristics earnings across regions, and by the frictions individuals face to move and reallocate across space. 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 analysis focuses on the role of income shocks, precautionary savings, ...
Journal Article
Opportunity for Whom? Building Wealth Through Advancing Racial Equity
America is undergoing a profound demographic shift amid rising inequality and persistent racial inequities. By 2030, the majority of workers under 25 will be people of color.1 By 2044, the majority of Americans will be people of color.2 Rising diversity is a tremendous asset ? if all people can access the resources and opportunity they need to thrive. If we want to truly build wealth in communities, we must relentlessly embrace the conviction that everyone in America can and should live in communities of opportunity, where good schools, healthy environments, safe homes, quality jobs, and ...
Report
The Demographics of Wealth 2015, Essay No. 1: Race, Ethnicity and Wealth
This first essay in the "Demographics of Wealth" series examines the connection between race or ethnicity and wealth accumulation over the past quarter-century. As with subsequent essays, this one is the result of an analysis of data collected between 1989 and 2013 through the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances. More than 40,000 heads of households were interviewed over those years.
Report
The Demographics of Wealth 2015, Essay No. 3: Age, Birth Year and Wealth
This essay documents significant differences in financial choices and financial outcomes across the life cycle (that is, at different stages of life) and across birth-year cohorts (that is, comparing different groups of people who were born at about the same time). Like race-, ethnicity- and education-related disparities, the age- and birth year-related differences described here have existed at least since 1989, when our data begin. We show that gaps in several financial behaviors and financial outcomes related to age and year of birth have grown larger in recent years.
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.
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 ...
Report
Demographics of Wealth 2018, Essay No. 2: A Lost Generation? Long-Lasting Wealth Impacts of the Great Recession on Young Families
This essay explores the connections between a person's birth year and measures of his or her family's financial well-being, including income and wealth. We found that wealth losses occurred across the age spectrum around the Great Recession but that families younger than retirement age suffered the most and have rebounded slowly. Based on data from nearly 48,000 families born throughout the 20th century, we found that families headed by someone born in 1960 or later were less likely to have recovered by 2016 than older families.