IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/crr/crrwps/wp2024-16.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

How Much Could Will-Writing Reduce the Racial Wealth Gap?

Author

Listed:
  • Jean-Pierre Aubry
  • Alicia H. Munnell
  • Gal Wettstein
  • Oliver Shih

Abstract

This paper examines the persistent racial wealth gap between Black and White households in the United States, focusing on the disparity in will-writing rates as a contributing factor. Despite attempts to bridge the wealth gap since Emancipation, progress has stalled, and since the 1980s, the gap has actually widened. The analysis investigates the potential for equalizing will-writing rates between Black and White individuals to narrow this wealth gap over past generations. Utilizing data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and employing both reduced-form and more structural analytical approaches, the study estimates the impact of will-writing on wealth accumulation and intergenerational wealth transfers. The findings suggest that equalizing will-writing rates could have reduced the racial wealth gap by 10 percent over three generations, underscoring wills as a significant, yet not singular, factor in addressing racial wealth disparities. The paper concludes that interventions that increase will-writing are one promising avenue for helping narrow the racial wealth gap.

Suggested Citation

  • Jean-Pierre Aubry & Alicia H. Munnell & Gal Wettstein & Oliver Shih, 2024. "How Much Could Will-Writing Reduce the Racial Wealth Gap?," Working Papers, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College wp2024-16, Center for Retirement Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:crr:crrwps:wp2024-16
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://crr.bc.edu/how-much-could-will-writing-reduce-the-racial-wealth-gap/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    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:crr:crrwps:wp2024-16. 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: Amy Grzybowski or Christopher F Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/crrbcus.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.