IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedgfe/2006-13.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Currents and undercurrents: changes in the distribution of wealth, 1989-2004

Author

Listed:
  • Arthur B. Kennickell

Abstract

This paper considers changes in the distribution of the wealth of U.S. families over the 1989-2004 period using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). Real net worth grew broadly over this period. At the same time, there are indications that wealth became more concentrated, but the result does not hold unambiguously across a set of plausible measures. For example, the Gini coefficient shows significant increases in the concentration of wealth from 1989 to 2004, but the wealth share of the wealthiest one percent of families did not change significantly. Graphical analysis suggests that there was a shift in favor of the top of the distribution, while for the broad middle of the distribution increases were about in proportion to earlier wealth. Within this period, there are other interesting patterns. For example, from 1992 to 2004 the wealth share of the least wealthy half of the population fell significantly to 2.5 percent of total wealth. The data show little in the way of significant distributional shifts since the 2001 survey. The paper also presents some information on underlying factors that may explain a part of the distribution of wealth, including capital gains, saving behavior and income, inheritances, and other factors. There are two special topic sections in the paper. The first presents information on the distributions of wealth of African American and Hispanic families. The second presents information on the use of debt across the distribution of wealth.

Suggested Citation

  • Arthur B. Kennickell, 2006. "Currents and undercurrents: changes in the distribution of wealth, 1989-2004," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2006-13, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
  • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2006-13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2006/200613/200613abs.html
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2006/200613/200613pap.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Degan, Arianna & Thibault, Emmanuel, 2016. "Dynastic accumulation of wealth," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 81(C), pages 66-78.
    2. Jon D. Wisman & Aaron Pacitti, 2014. "What the Rich Won Over the Past 35 Years and What Everyone Else Lost," Working Papers 2014-08, American University, Department of Economics.
    3. Alice Henriques Volz & Lindsay Jacobs & Elizabeth Llanes & Kevin B. Moore & Jeffrey P. Thompson, 2020. "Wealth Distribution and Retirement Preparation among Early Savers," Working Papers 20-4, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    4. Jesper Roine & Daniel Waldenström, 2009. "Wealth Concentration over the Path of Development: Sweden, 1873–2006," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 111(1), pages 151-187, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Wealth;

    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:fip:fedgfe:2006-13. 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: Ryan Wolfslayer ; Keisha Fournillier (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbgvus.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.