Search Results
Journal Article
Is student debt jeopardizing the short-term financial health of U.S. households?
In this study, the authors use the Survey of Consumer Finances to determine whether student loans are associated with household net worth. They find that median 2009 net worth ($117,700) for households with no outstanding student loan debt is nearly three times higher than for households with outstanding student loan debt ($42,800). Further, multivariate statistics indicate that households with outstanding student loan debt and a median 2007 net worth of $128,828 incur a loss of about 54 percent of net worth in 2009 compared with households with similar net worth levels but no student loan ...
Working Paper
Tobin lives: integrating evolving credit market architecture into flow of funds based macro-models
After the global financial crisis, there is greater awareness of the need to understand the interactions between the financial sector and the real economy and hence the potential for financial instability. Data from the financial flow of funds, previously relatively neglected, are now seen as crucial to the data monitoring carried out by central banks. This paper revisits earlier efforts to understand financial-real linkages, such those of Tobin and the Yale School, and proposes a modeling framework for analysing the household flow of funds jointly with consumption. The consumption function ...
Journal Article
Household financial stress and home prices
Report
After the fall : rebuilding family balance sheets, rebuilding the economy
Essay from the 2012 Annual Report.
Journal Article
Buy a home or rent? A better way to choose
Knowing whether buying a home is a better financial move for a family than renting requires a consideration of costs and options that people often neglect to factor in. One aspect of the calculation that is almost always overlooked is uncertainty--the fact that no matter how good one's estimates of the future are, the future can turn out differently than projected. Incorporating uncertainty into the rent-or-buy calculation gives potential homebuyers information that can improve their decisions. While incorporating uncertainty is complicated, it's made easier with the Cleveland Fed's online ...
Periodic Essay
Still digging out: real net worth per household has rebounded 63 percent since hitting bottom in early 2009
Short essays related to research on understanding and strengthening the balance sheets of American households.
Speech
The recovery and monetary policy
Remarks at the National Association for Business Economics Annual Meeting, New York City.
Periodic Essay
The nation's wealth recovery since 2009 conceals vastly different balance-sheet realities among America's families
Short essays related to research on understanding and strengthening the balance sheets of American households.
Working Paper
The effect of sales tax holidays on household consumption patterns
Sales tax holidays (STHs) are the temporary suspension of state (and some local) sales taxes on selected retail items for a brief period of time. The policy has gained popularity in recent years, beginning in one state in 1997 and growing to twenty by 2008. Despite the increased frequency with which states use STHs, little research has been conducted to study how households respond to this temporary tax manipulation. Our paper offers the first household-level, microeconometric evaluation on the effect of STHs on household consumption patterns. We find that on STHs, households increase the ...
Journal Article
The diverse impacts of the great recession
The Great Recession had a large negative impact on the U.S. economy. Asset prices, most notably stock and house prices, declined substantially, resulting in a loss in wealth for many American households. In this article, Makoto Nakajima documents how diverse households were affected in a variety of dimensions during the Great Recession, in particular between 2007 and 2009, using newly available data from the 2007-2009 Survey of Consumer Finances. He discusses why it is important to look at the data on households, rather than focusing on the aggregate data, and he reviews some recent studies ...