Suchergebnisse

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has made more contributions to the study of income volatility than any other dataset in the United States. Its record of providing data for seminal research is unmatched. In this article, we first present the reasons that the PSID has made such major contributions to research on the topic. Then we review the major papers that have used the PSID to study income volatility, comparing their results to those using other datasets. Last, we present new results for income volatility among U.S. men through 2014, finding that both gross volatility and the variance of transitory shocks display a three-phase trend: upward trends from the 1970s to the 1980s, a stable period in the 1990s through the early 2000s, and a large increase during the Great Recession.

Abstract
The wealth of US families had not returned to its prerecession level by 2013, six years after the onset of the Great Recession. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of this slow and uneven episode of wealth recovery, using family-level data from the Survey of Consumer Finances 1989–2013. Both descriptive results and regressions controlling for life cycle wealth accumulation show that families of color and less-educated families are falling behind in wealth recovery because their wealth portfolios are concentrated in housing, which has recovered very slowly. The decomposition results suggest that homeownership plays a significant role in explaining wealth disparity by race, ethnicity, and education at the mean and bottom of the wealth distribution. Understanding the uneven wealth recovery has important implications for redesigning asset-related policies and narrowing wealth gaps.