Not properly accounting for differences between business owners and nonbusiness owners in studies of household wealth can lead to erroneous conclusions about the significance of different saving motives. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from the 1980s and 1990s, we show that...

In this paper, we show the pivotal role business owners play in estimating the importance of the precautionary saving motive. Since business owners hold larger amounts of wealth than other households for non-precautionary reasons and also face highly volatile income, they induce a correlation...

We assess the importance of the precautionary saving motive by relying on a direct question about precautionary wealth from the 1995 and 1998 waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances. In this survey, a new question has been designed to elicit the amount of desired precautionary wealth. This...

The propensity to become a business owner is a nonlinear function of wealth. The relationship between wealth and entry into entrepreneurship is essentially flat over the majority of the wealth distribution. It is only at the top of the wealth distributionafter the ninety-fifth percentilethat a...

We develop a framework with rich worker heterogeneity, firm monopsony power, and putty-clay technology to study the distributional impact of the minimum wage in the short and long run. Our production technology is disciplined to be consistent with the small estimated employment effects of the...

We undertake an assessment of our two decades of research on financial literacy, building on our empirical research and theoretical work casting financial knowledge as a form of investment in human capital. We also draw on recent data to determine who is the most - and least - financially savvy...

This article provides a concise narrative overview of the rapidly growing empirical literature on financial literacy and financial education. We first discuss stylized facts on the demographic correlates of financial literacy. We next cover the evidence on the effects of financial literacy on...

Start-ups and other entrepreneurial ventures make a significant contribution to the US economy, particularly in the tech sector, where they comprise some of the largest and most influential companies. Yet for every high-profile, high-growth company like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google,...

In 2009, the Federal Reserve Board implemented a survey of families that participated in the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to gain detailed information on the effects of the recent recession on all types of households. Using data from the 2007-09 SCF panel, we highlight the variation in...