Search Results
Working Paper
Seven Economic Facts About the U.S. Racial Wealth Gap
Using data from the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances and the U.S. Census Bureau, along with data and research from other sources, this paper presents seven economic facts about the racial wealth gap in the U.S. We present data on racial disparities in income, employment, homeownership, education, access to credit, and retirement savings – all factors that contribute to a significant and persistent gap in net worth between households of different races and ethnicities, particularly between Black households and White households. While none of the economic factors listed fully explains the ...
Newsletter
Income and Wealth Inequality
Income and wealth are becoming more unequal over time. The September 2022 issue of Page One Economics discusses how income and wealth inequality are measured, what drives differences among individuals and households, and how growing inequality may affect the overall economy.
Journal Article
Wealth inequality among the Forbes 400 and U.S. households overall
While widening income inequality in the United States has garnered much public and academic attention in recent years, wealth inequality reveals an even starker picture. For instance, in 2010, the top 1 percent of income earners received 19.8 percent of total household income. In the same year, the wealthiest 1 percent held 35.4 percent of total household wealth (Kaplan 2013). Moreover, wealth inequality has increased in recent decades, with most gains concentrated among the richest 20 percent of households (Wolff 2013).
Working Paper
Use it or Lose it: Efficiency Gains from Wealth Taxation
How does wealth taxation differ from capital income taxation? When the return on investment is equal across individuals, a well-known result is that the two tax systems are equivalent. Motivated by recent empirical evidence documenting persistent heterogeneity in rates of return across individuals, we revisit this question. With such heterogeneity, the two tax systems have opposite implications for both efficiency and inequality. Under capital income taxation, entrepreneurs who are more productive, and therefore generate more income, pay higher taxes. Under wealth taxation, entrepreneurs who ...
Working Paper
To Have or Not to Have: Understanding Wealth Inequality
Differences in household saving rates are a key driver of wealth inequality. But what determines these differences in saving rates and wealth accumulation? We provide a new answer to this longstanding question based on new empirical evidence and a new modeling framework. In the data, we decompose U.S. household wealth into its main portfolio components to document two new empirical facts. First, the variation in wealth by income is mainly driven by differences in participation in asset markets rather than by the amounts invested. Wealth differences are a matter of to have or not to have. ...
Report
Have US Households Depleted All the Excess Savings They Accumulated during the Pandemic?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, US households accumulated a historically high volume of personal savings. As the crisis waned, personal savings started to decline. Economists disagree on whether households have drained their excess savings, and they disagree on which income group is more likely to have done so. The lack of consensus stems from different assumptions about today’s long-term saving rate, which is used as a benchmark to define excess savings. If households need to set aside a higher share of their income now relative to before the pandemic, then pandemic-era excess savings have ...
Working Paper
Accounting for Wealth Concentration in the United States
We assess the empirical relevance of different macroeconomic modeling approaches to wealth concentration, using the joint distribution of earnings, capital income and net worth in combination with an OLG model of household heterogeneity. We find large earnings disparities to be the primary source of US wealth concentration. This reflects the fact that labor income, from salaries but also from entrepreneurship, is a major income source for top income and wealth groups in the data. Bequests and differences in rates of return on capital together explain about half the holdings of the wealthiest ...
Working Paper
Wealth Inequality and Return Heterogeneity During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Wealth inequality in the U.S., measured by the top 1% wealth share, experienced dramatic changes in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Economic theory suggests that the key to understanding wealth inequality is heterogeneity in the return to net worth across households. To understand the dynamics of wealth inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic, we develop a novel methodology that allows us to estimate the returns to net worth for different groups of households at relatively high frequency. We show that portfolio heterogeneity and asset price movements are the main determinants of ...
Working Paper
Wealth Distribution and Retirement Preparation among Early Savers
This paper develops a new combined-wealth measure by augmenting data on net worth from the Survey of Consumer Finances with estimates of defined benefit (DB) pension and expected Social Security wealth. We use this concept to explore retirement preparation among two groups of households in pre-retirement years (aged 40 through 49 and 50 through 59), and to explore the concentration of wealth. We find evidence of moderate, but rising, shortfalls in retirement preparation. We also show that including DB pension and Social Security wealth results in markedly lower measures of wealth ...
Working Paper
Uninsured risk, stagnation, and fiscal policy
Japan is in the midst of a protracted spell of depressed economic activity. Japan's economic stagnation has occurred against a background of rising earnings risk. Occupational stability is falling as routine occupations disappear and implicit lifetime employment guarantees are gradually disappearing. At the same time, earnings in some high-skilled occupations have continued to grow. The resulting polarization in earnings has also been accompanied by an increase in wealth inequality. We develop a framework that relates these observations. In our model, an increase in uninsured earnings risk ...