As the baby boomers begin to retire, a great deal remains unknown about the evolution of wealth toward the end of life. In this paper, we develop a new measure of household resources that converts total financial, nonfinancial, and annuitized assets into an expected annual amount of wealth per...

The level of outstanding home mortgage debt in the United States has declined about $1.5 trillion, or 13 percent, since its peak six years ago. This large drop in mortgage debt has been the primary driver of the reduction in household liabilities often referred to as "household deleveraging" and...

The Federal Reserve Board has begun an ambitious and long-term effort to upgrade the Financial Accounts of the United States to provide a significantly more detailed and timely picture of financial intermediation in the United States

The Federal Reserve Board has begun an ambitious and long-term effort to enhance the Financial Accounts of the United States by providing additional detail and disaggregation, higher frequency data, and additional documentation and analysis of financial data, in order to improve our picture of...

As the baby boomers begin to retire, a great deal remains unknown about the evolution of wealth toward the end of life. In this paper, we develop a new measure of household resources that converts total financial, nonfinancial, and annuitized assets into an expected annual amount of wealth per...

Dramatic structural changes in the U.S. pension system, along with the impending wave of retiring baby boomers, have given rise to a broad policy discussion of the adequacy of household retirement wealth. We construct a uniquely comprehensive measure of wealth for households aged 51 and older in...

Even risky pension sponsors could offer essentially riskless pension promises by contributing a sufficient level of resources to their pension trust funds and by investing those resources in fixed-income securities designed to deliver their payoffs just as pension obligations are coming due....

We construct two measures of the current wealth adequacy of older U.S. households using the 1998--2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The first is the ratio of "comprehensive wealth"--defined as net worth plus the expected value of future income streams--to the wealth that would...

We examine 401(k) borrowing since 1992 and identify a puzzle: despite potential gains from borrowing against 401(k) assets instead of from other sources, most eligible households eschew 401(k) loans, including many who carry relatively expensive balances on credit cards and auto loans. We...