How Much Financial Help Do People Give and Receive? Evidence from the Understanding America Survey

John Jones, Jason Kosakow and Lillian Zhu

Richmond Fed Economic Brief, 2026, vol. 26, issue 19

Abstract: The Understanding America Study has added a module recording the transfers that respondents have given to and/or received from their family and friends. The module includes information on financial transfers of wealth, along with in-kind transfers of services such as room and board or caregiving, and these variables can be linked to the broader UAS dataset. In this article, we describe and summarize the variables in the new module. The data indicate that transfers are widespread, usually small but sometimes substantial, and most commonly from parents to adult children.

Keywords: business surveys; household and consumer finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_brief/2026/eb_26-19 Briefing (text/html)

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:fip:fedreb:103404

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Richmond Fed Economic Brief from Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Pascasio ().