IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/aut/wpaper/2024-05.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Sexual Orientation and Financial Well-Being in the United States

Author

Listed:
  • Christopher S. Carpenter

    (Vanderbilt University)

  • Kabir Dasgupta

    (Federal Reserve Board of Governors)

  • Zofsha Merchant

    (Federal Reserve Board of Governors)

  • Alexander Plum

    (New Zealand Policy Research Institute, Auckland University of Technology.)

Abstract

We study the relationship between financial well-being and sexual orientation in the United States using Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) data for 2019-2022. We document that people who are lesbian, gay, and bisexual (or LGB) have significantly more difficulty managing financially than similarly situated heterosexual individuals—and this pre-dated the COVID-19 pandemic. Differences are found across a broad array of current and future financial well-being outcomes, including retirement savings, rainy-day funds, credit card and schooling debts, and the use of alternative financial services such as payday loans. Differences in partnership, financial assistance from parents, financial knowledge, and risk preferences cannot explain these differences. Instead, we document that some social vulnerabilities such as exposure to discriminatory behavior and violence are differentially experienced by LGB people, which may play a role. Our results demonstrate that people who are lesbian, gay, and bisexual experience significantly more financial insecurity than previously understood.

Suggested Citation

  • Christopher S. Carpenter & Kabir Dasgupta & Zofsha Merchant & Alexander Plum, 2024. "Sexual Orientation and Financial Well-Being in the United States," Working Papers 2024-05, Auckland University of Technology, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:aut:wpaper:2024-05
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.aut.ac.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/917398/working-paper-24_05.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    : sexual orientation; financial well-being; debt; financial knowledge;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J1 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aut:wpaper:2024-05. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Gail Pacheco (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fbautnz.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.