Racial Wealth Disparities Is the Gap Closing?

Edward Nathan Wolff ()

Economics Public Policy Brief Archive from Levy Economics Institute, The

Abstract: Despite decades of policies aimed at improving the economic position of African Americans in terms of relative income and earnings, they remain substantially behind whites, and research presented in this brief indicates that the wealth gap is even more staggering. Following families over time in order to understand racial differences in the sources and patterns of wealth accumulation, the author finds that African Americans would have gained significant ground relative to whites in the past 30 years if they had inherited similar amounts, comparable levels of family income, and more similar portfolio compositions. Therefore, even if the income gap between whites and African Americans were immediately eliminated, it may take another two generations for the wealth gap to close. However, certain policies could help speed up the process.

New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv and nep-pke
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.levy.org/pubs/ppb66.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Racial Wealth Disparities: Is the Gap Closing? (2000)
Working Paper: Racial Wealth Disparities: Is the Gap Closing? (2000)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lev:levppb:66

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Public Policy Brief Archive from Levy Economics Institute, The
Series data maintained by Barbara Murphy ().