Impact of the Great Recession and Beyond: Disparities in Wealth Building by Generation and Race

This paper uses over two decades of Survey of Consumer Finances data and a pseudo-panel technique to measure the impact of the Great Recession on wealth relative to the counterfactual of what wealth would have been given wealth accumulation trajectories. Our regression-adjusted synthetic cohort-level models find that the Great Recession reduced the wealth of American families by 28.5 percent—nearly double the magnitude of previous pre-post mean descriptive estimates and double the magnitude of any previous recession since the 1980s. The housing market was only part of the story; all major wealth components fell as a result of the Great Recession. 

Reference Information

Author: 

Signe-Mary McKernan,
Caroline Ratcliffe,
Eugene Steuerle,
Sisi Zhang
Publication Date: 
December 2013