How do private transfers differ by race and ethnicity and do such differences explain the racial and ethnic disparity in wealth? Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this study examines private transfers by race and ethnicity and explores a causal relationship between private transfers and...

Using new nationally representative data from the National Financial Capability State-by-State Survey, this paper examines the relationship between state-level alternative financial service (AFS) policies (prohibitions, price caps, disclosures) and consumer use of five AFS products: payday...

Title insurance and settlement costs represent a substantial proportion of real estate closing costs paid by consumers and add significantly to the cost of purchasing a home. This study uses data on mortgages in counties covering five major metropolitan real estate markets to estimate the extent...

Title charges include title insurance premiums and charges for settling a loan. Title charges vary considerably from a median of $1,971 in California to $625 in North Dakota. This report analyzes variation in settlement costs using data from over 3,000 FHA-insured, 30-year fixed-rate home...

Increased labor force participation of the elderly can reduce the fiscal and economic stress from the projected aging of the population in the next century. This paper uses Survey of Income and Program Participation data matched with longitudinal earnings histories and Social Security benefit...

Consumers are emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic into an economically tumultuous period marked by high inflation and other threats to financial security. How has the financial standing of America’s consumers, including those who are economically distressed, changed in response to the economic...

Technological innovations have changed the way consumers manage money and conduct their financial lives. Today’s technological landscape offers a range of personal finance apps that allow consumers to pay bills, monitor budgets, manage cash flow, and save. The automation built into personal...

We evaluate the impact on household income of Viet Nam's national target programme to build a new countryside for the period from 2010 to 2015. The purpose of the programme is to modernize rural Viet Nam. Given the universal implementation of the programme, we use a quasi-experimental approach...

There is a large literature on earnings and income volatility in labor economics, household finance, and macroeconomics. One strand of that literature has studied whether individual earnings volatility has risen or fallen in the U.S. over the last several decades. There are strong disagreements...

Value at Risk (VaR) is used to illustrate the maximum potential loss under a given confidence level, and is just a single indicator to evaluate risk ignoring any information about income. The present paper will generalize one-dimensional VaR to two-dimensional VaR with income-risk double...