Recent trends in wealth inequality among older Americans in two surveys
Gábor Kézdi et al.
What the paper says
We document changes in wealth inequality across American households with a member aged 55 or older, comparing data in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) with that in the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) between 1998 and 2016. We examine net wealth including housing, financial and nonfinancial assets and debt, without the cash value of insurances, DB pensions or Social Security wealth. We find very similar distributions of net wealth in the two surveys between the 25<sup>th</sup> and 90<sup>th</sup> percentiles, but substantially higher wealth in the SCF at the top of the distribution. Both surveys show an increase in wealth inequality between 1998 and 2016, first mostly due to increased wealth at the top, and, after 2012, due to an increase in the share of households with very little wealth as well. Both surveys agree that wealth inequality by education and race, already substantial in 1998, increased further by 2016.
1 citation
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.00 × 0.4 = 0.00 |
| M · momentum | 0.80 × 0.15 = 0.12 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.