Authors
Lindsay Jacobs
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Elizabeth Llanes
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Kevin Moore
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Jeffrey Thompson
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
Alice Henriques Volz
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Wealth Distribution and Retirement Preparation Among Early Savers
Abstract
This paper develops a new combined-wealth measure by augmenting data on net worth from the Survey of Consumer Finances with estimates of defined benefit (DB) pension and expected Social Security wealth. We use this concept to explore retirement preparation among two groups of households in pre-retirement years (aged 40 through 49 and 50 through 59), and to explore the concentration of wealth. We find evidence of moderate, but rising, shortfalls in retirement preparation. We also show that including DB pension and Social Security wealth results in markedly lower measures of wealth concentration, and it slightly moderates trends toward a higher concentration over time.