Disparities in Wealth Accumulation and Loss from the Great Recession and Beyond

Signe-Mary McKernan, Caroline Ratcliffe, C. Eugene Steuerle and Sisi Zhang ()

American Economic Review, 2014, vol. 104, issue 5, 240-44

Abstract: Using over two decades of Survey of Consumer Finances data and a pseudo-panel technique, we measure the impact of the Great Recession on US family wealth relative to the counterfactual of what wealth would have been given wealth accumulation trajectories. Our synthetic cohort-level models find that the Great Recession reduced average family wealth by 28.5 percent–nearly double the magnitude of previous pre-post mean descriptive estimates and double the magnitude of any previous recession since the 1980s. The housing market was only part of the story; all major wealth components fell as a result of the Great Recession.

JEL-codes: D14 D31 D91 E32 G01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
Note: DOI: 10.1257/aer.104.5.240
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.104.5.240 (application/pdf)
http://www.aeaweb.org/aer/app/10405/P2014_1172_app.pdf (application/pdf)
http://www.aeaweb.org/aer/ds/10405/P2014_1172_ds.zip (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

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:aea:aecrev:v:104:y:2014:i:5:p:240-44

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Review is currently edited by Esther Duflo

More articles in American Economic Review from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().