Recent changes in U. S. family finances: results from the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances

By Arthur Kennickell, Martha Starr-Mccluer, Brian J. Surette. 2000

338 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using data from the Federal Reserve Board's two most recent Surveys of Consumer Finances, this article provides a detailed picture of changes in the financial condition of U.S. families between 1995 and 1998. The financial situation of families changed notably in the three-year period. While income continued a moderate upward trend, net worth grew strongly, and the increase in net worth was broadly shared by different demographic groups. A booming stock market accounts for a substantial part of the rise in net worth, but the data also suggest that improvements in financial circumstances extended to many families that did not own stocks. The indebtedness of families grew, but less rapidly than their assets. Nonetheless, compared with 1995, debt repayments in 1998 accounted for a larger share of the income of the typical family with debt, and the proportion of debtors who were late with their payments by sixty days or more in the year preceding the survey was also higher.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Finance

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aece5d99999b6355babef85f1cdc3e76c094115f

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Citations in the corpus

The 6D Bias and the Equity-Premium Puzzle (2001, methodology): “Kennickell et al (2000) analyze the 1998 SCF data to see whether self-reported equity wealth covaries with movements in stock market indexes.”
How do household portfolio shares vary with age? Unpub-lished working paper (2000, background): “One of the earliest such studies, King and Leape (1987), uses a single cross section of data and finds that the likelihood of equity ownership increases with age.”
Financial Institutions in Disadvantaged Areas: A Comparative Analysis of Policies Encouraging Financial Inclusion in Britain and the United States (2004, background): “They are single people and couples who do not have a secure job, and ethnic groups for whom language, culture, and religion may be barriers (Kennickell et al, 2000).”
The Effect of Credit on Spending Decisions: The Role of the Credit Limit and Credibility (2002, methodology): “The data for this study come from the latest available Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) conducted in 1998 (Kennickell et al. 2000).”
Credit Card Borrowing, Delinquency, and Personal Bankruptcy (2000, result): “Compared to the 1995 survey, Kennickell, Starr-McCluer, and Surette (2000) found that by 1998 the median credit card balances owed by households in the lowest income bracket (less than $10,000 a year) almost doubled, from $600 to $1,100 (in 1998 dollars).”
Borrowing Costs and the Demand for Equity over the Life Cycle (2006, positive): “First, our model implies that most households accumulate little or no financial wealth until middle age, consistent with much empirical evidence (e.g., Kennickell et al., 2000, and Lusardi et al., 2001).”
Labor Income, Housing Prices and Homeownership (2003, background): “housing and debt are held is not a bad approximation for the households in question, although it must be noted that Kennickel et al. (2000) show that a majority of stock ownership is in the form of retirement plans.”