Savings and wealth of the lifetime rich: evidence from the UK and US

Antoine Bozio, Carl Emmerson (), Cormac O'Dea and Gemma Tetlow
Additional contact information
Carl Emmerson: Institute for Fiscal Studies and Institute for Fiscal Studies

No W13/30, IFS Working Papers from Institute for Fiscal Studies

Abstract: Whether higher lifetime income households do save a larger share of their income is one of the longstanding empirical questions in economics that has been surprisingly difficult to answer. We use both consumption data and a new dataset containing both individual survey data on wealth holdings and administrative data on earnings histories from the UK to examine this question. We find evidence of a positive relationship between saving rates (and wealth accumulation) and levels of permanent income. Our findings are consistent with earlier results from Dynan, Skinner and Zeldes (2004) using consumption data from the US, but somewhat at odds with evidence from the UK which has examined retirement wealth and lifetime earnings in the Health and Retirement Study, HRS (Gustman & Steinmeier 1999, Venti & Wise 1998). We present new evidence using more recent HRS data, applying exactly the same methodology as we have used on the UK data, and find broadly the same results as these earlier papers. This suggests that the differences are not solely driven by differences in methodology or time period considered.

Date: 2013-12-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ifs.org.uk/wps/wp201330.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.ifs.org.uk/wps/wp201330.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.ifs.org.uk/wps/wp201330.pdf [302 Found]--> https://ifs.org.uk/wps/wp201330.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:13/30

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
The Institute for Fiscal Studies 7 Ridgmount Street LONDON WC1E 7AE

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IFS Working Papers from Institute for Fiscal Studies The Institute for Fiscal Studies 7 Ridgmount Street LONDON WC1E 7AE. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emma Hyman ().