This study examines gender differences in poverty determinants among single-headed households in the United States using data from the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances. Using logistic regression with decomposition methods, we analyzed 1,383 households (833 female-headed, 550 male-headed) to identify factors associated with living below the federal poverty threshold. Results reveal significant differences in poverty determinants between men and women. Working for an employer, self-employment, education level, and age were negatively associated with poverty, while fair health status and income uncertainty were positively associated with poverty risk. The decomposition analysis found a statistically significant coefficient effect (p < 0.0001), indicating that the impact of independent variables on poverty likelihood differs by gender. Employment showed a marginally significant differential effect (p = 0.068), with working for an employer having a smaller protective effect against poverty for women compared to men. However, no constant effect was detected, suggesting gender differences in poverty result from differential responses to specific determinants rather than gender itself. Female-headed households were more likely to have dependent children (38.3% versus 12.7%) and report poorer health status, while male-headed households had higher average net worth. These findings suggest that gender-neutral poverty reduction strategies may be insufficient, and that targeted interventions, such as affordable childcare support to enhance labor market participation among low-income women, are needed to effectively address gender disparities in poverty rates.

We develop a theory of sequential stock search to explain U.S. household portfolio composition, focusing on the ‘diversification puzzle’ and its relationship with wealth, search costs, and portfolio risk. In this approach, investors only include a stock in their portfolio if it improves expected utility, accounting for informal effort and professional search costs. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, we find that under rational expectations, investors are incentivized to search for and rank stocks by expected return, ultimately selecting only a few with the highest potential. This behavior helps explain why most households do not follow simple diversification strategies, such as investing in index funds. Our model aligns with empirical evidence: the median stockholding household owns three stocks, and 33.2% own just one. Simulations calibrated to SCF data show a hump-shaped pattern in total financial risk, which increases with wealth before declining, highlighting the complex dynamics that drive household investment decisions.

In Russia, more than half of the population has no savings and that reduces household financial resilience, especially in the face of economic shocks. There is a question whether improving financial literacy can help address this problem. Using the data from four waves of the All-Russian Household Survey on Consumer Finances, a fixed-effects panel regression revealed that financial literacy is associated with both the availability and the amount of household savings. However, this relationship is heterogeneous across socio-demographic groups and savings forms. For example, research confirms a positive correlation between higher levels of financial literacy and specific demographics, including male-headed households, urban residency, and higher income levels. Financial literacy is positively associated with both availability and the size of bank deposits while being unrelated to stocks or cash. Robustness checks confirm that the main results remain stable despite plausible changes to model specifications and sample modifications.

ABSTRACT One of the most dramatic changes in the American retirement income system since 1980 has been the replacement of many traditional defined benefit (DB) pension plans with defined contribution (DC) ones. The main research question is whether this transformation was beneficial to American households, particularly Blacks and Hispanics. Based on the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), Black and Hispanic households are found to have made remarkable progress in retirement income and poverty reduction over 1989–2007. Replacement rates rose for Black households but declined for Hispanics. However, over 2007–2022, while whites experienced continued steady growth in median retirement income, there was almost no change for Blacks and Hispanics. Whites also experienced continued steady growth in mean retirement income, while Blacks underwent much slower growth and Hispanics saw an absolute decline. Poverty rates will rise steeply for Blacks but change little for whites and Hispanics. Income replacement rates will rise for all three groups.

Fiscal Policy Transmission Through Production Networks with Heterogeneous&amp;nbsp;Households

Do borrowers know their mortgage terms?

&lt;b&gt;The Holistic Family Economy Approach&lt;/b&gt;: Why Seeing the Big Picture Transforms Your Portfolio

Abstract This study investigates how gender, marital status, and financial confidence relate to financial risk tolerance. The analysis revealed single men exhibited greater financial risk tolerance than married men, while both single and married women were less risk-tolerant than married men. Financial confidence was positively associated with financial risk tolerance; however, overconfident married women and single women with appropriately high financial confidence had lower risk tolerances than married men. These findings explain how gender and marital status work in conjunction with psychological factors like financial confidence when evaluating clients’ risk preferences. Implications for financial practitioners include adopting gender-informed frameworks to better tailor risk assessment and communication.

Financial decisions have become more complicated in recent decades. Greater financial responsibility has shifted from the public sector (healthcare, college, and retirement) to households. As a result, many households have accumulated debt that makes it difficult to save. A popular response to rising financial responsibilities is formal financial literacy education. In this paper, we use the financial literacy questions in the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) known as the “big three” to study what characteristics are associated with high (and low) levels of financial literacy. SCF includes additional questions that allow us to analyze financial literacy among various households. We use lasso-logistic regression to identify the financial behaviors most associated with financial outcomes (e.g., bankruptcy) and behavior (e.g., emergency savings). We find that financial literacy has no significant effect on financial outcomes and behaviors such as debt payments-to-income or having emergency savings. Instead, financial literacy is correlated with income and wealth. These findings suggest that when looking at financial wellbeing, financial literacy is more likely a byproduct of socioeconomic factors and a dose of luck rather than a cause of better financial decision making.

Abstract Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) posits that as future time horizons shorten, older adults increasingly prioritize emotional meaning. Reflecting this shift, prosocial behavior such as charitable giving tends to rise with age. Yet this pattern has not been tested in large, nationally representative surveys. This gap is important given that older adults hold a majority of national wealth and their giving decisions carry broad societal implications. Using data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, we found that in 2022, adults aged 55 and over held 73% of the national wealth (ages 40-54: 20%; under 40: 7%), up from 53% in 1989, a one-third surge across three decades. Prosocial behavior was examined in the Panel Study on Income Dynamics, a nationally representative sample collected in 2023 (N = 7,694; ages 18–98, M = 48, SD = 16). Consistent with prior findings, older adults were more likely to donate (β = 0.01, p&amp;lt;.001, R²=.081) and donated larger amounts (β = 38.47, p&amp;lt;.001, R²=.013) than younger adults. Similarly, older adults were more likely to volunteer (β = 0.002, p&amp;lt;.001, R²=.005) and volunteered more hours (β = 0.01, p&amp;lt;.001, R²=.004) than younger adults. These effects held after controlling for wealth, race, and marital status. Taken together, the growing concentration of wealth among older adults and their heightened prosociality suggest they may represent a strategic focus for philanthropy. Encouraging charitable giving in later life could help redirect intergenerational wealth transfers to promote equity.

Privately owned business assets are an important source of wealth for families across the world, but measurement issues are believed to hamper our understanding of these firms. We use income and valuations of private firms in the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), first validating the data against external aggregates and then using these data to find rates of return for private firms. With the exception of the years leading up to the Global Financial Crisis, overall rates of return on public firms have generally outpaced rates of return on private firms during the past 30 years.

This study investigates how gender differences in financial risk-taking vary across generations, using microdata from the 2023 U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances. Drawing on behavioural finance theory, it examines both self-reported risk attitudes and actual portfolio compositions across five generational cohorts. Regression analyses reveal that while men consistently report higher willingness to take financial risks, the gender gap has narrowed substantially among younger generations, particularly Generation X and Y, before modestly reappearing in Generation Z. However, actual investment behaviour shows minimal gender-based differences, suggesting that structural and socioeconomic factors—such as income, wealth, and access to financial instruments—play a greater role in determining portfolio risk than attitudes alone. These findings contribute to the literature on gender and behavioural finance and carry important policy implications for promoting financial inclusion, equitable access to investment opportunities, and targeted financial education aimed at sustaining the narrowing of gender disparities in financial decision-making.

This paper studies the effect of interest rate uncertainty on savings using microdata from the Survey of Consumer Finances 1989-2016. We find that, moving across the distribution of labor income, average wealth increases while interest rate uncertainty tends to fall. Strikingly, the average wealth of the top 10% labor income earners is on average twenty-fold larger than that of individuals belonging to the bottom 10% of the labor income distribution. Finally, savings reduce when interest rate is more uncertain. This suggests that an insurance policy against interest rate uncertainty would lead to an increase in aggregate capital stock.

The COVID-19 pandemic created unprecedented economic uncertainty, yet the relationship between health risk perceptions and precautionary household savings behavior remains poorly understood. This study examines how perceived health risks and financial hardship influenced precautionary savings behavior in the United States during the pandemic. Using data from the 2022 U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), we applied the Health Belief Model framework to analyze 4,595 households through hierarchical logistic regression, controlling for demographic and economic factors. Financial hardship (OR = 1.45, p &lt; .05) and government assistance (OR = 1.41, p &lt; .001) significantly predicted precautionary savings behavior, while a direct COVID-19 diagnosis did not. Notably, Black households were 65.6% more likely to save for precautionary reasons than White households. In conclusion, economic vulnerability was a more potent driver of precautionary saving than direct health risk perception. The findings provide a framework for designing culturally responsive policies and financial products to strengthen household resilience.

Household economic hardship in the United States is increasingly shaped by interacting pressures rather than a single income shortfall. Inflation, rent burdens, revolving debt, medical costs, labor-market volatility, and fraud losses combine to produce financial fragility that conventional scorecards often miss. This paper develops a publication-ready research framework for forecasting household economic hardship, financial fragility, and vulnerability through artificial intelligence and predictive analytics using public data through 2024. The framework integrates survey microdata and contextual indicators from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Making Ends Meet surveys and Financial Well-Being Scale, the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, USDA food security reports, the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, Bureau of Labor Statistics expenditure and inflation statistics, and Federal Trade Commission fraud-loss data. Building on the supplied literature and broader scholarship in household finance, explainable machine learning, and welfare measurement, the paper proposes a multimodal architecture that combines gradient boosting, temporal models, and graph-informed neighborhood context to predict three linked outcomes: immediate hardship, near-term fragility, and medium-horizon vulnerability. Data trends through 2024 show that the share of adults doing at least okay financially declined after 2021, emergency liquidity weakened, food insecurity rose, and reported fraud losses climbed sharply. The paper argues that explainable, fairness-audited models can improve targeting, consumer protection, and preventive intervention without reducing households to opaque risk labels. It concludes that AI can strengthen public-interest forecasting when embedded in transparent validation, governance, and human-centered implementation.

The study investigates whether frequent job-based relocations, which are typical for military service personnel, are correlated with households’ ability to accumulate housing wealth. Specifically, we investigate whether differences in homeownership rates and home equity values exist for two cohorts of military personnel, the older Korea/Vietnam and the younger post-Vietnam cohorts of servicemembers. The study accounts for individual financial stress and expectations about the economy, and controls for a rich set of demographic and socio-economic factors. Data sources are the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances and the 2021 National Financial Capability Study. Results show that the two cohorts of military households do not differ from civilian households with regard to the home ownership rate. Greater individual financial stress on one hand and more positive economic expectations on the other hand emerge as two opposing, but stress-related factors linked to lower homeownership rates. The Post-Vietnam military personnel cohort is associated with lower home equity values compared to civilian households, but no difference was found between the Korea/Vietnam cohort and civilian households. From a policy perspective, our findings indicate that housing-focused efforts in the military, such as targeted loan products, relocation allowances, financial education and counseling programs, appear to help military households cope with the demands of military career paths and the transition to post-active life. When limiting the sample to homeowners, the data indicate lower housing wealth accumulation among the younger, Post-Vietnam era military households, compared to civilian households. As frequent military moves may prevent these households from building housing wealth while in the service, this group has had less time to accumulate housing wealth, documenting the role of housing tenure length for wealth accumulation for this unique population group.

To examine whether the wealth context of households with children, marked by high rates of inequality and low levels of wealth for those at the bottom, also applies to elderly households and households without children. Children experience higher income poverty than elderly or working-age adults, but wealth and wealth deprivation comparisons across these groups have not been done. Exploring these differences may reveal another economic dimension on which households with children are uniquely vulnerable and inform policies aimed at financial stability. Data are drawn from the 1989 to 2022 waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances (N = 58,148 households), a nationally representative triannual survey of household wealth. The study tracks trends in wealth inequality, wealth holdings, and net worth poverty across three household types: non-elderly households with children, non-elderly households without children, and elderly households. Households with children exhibit higher wealth inequality, lower wealth levels, and greater net worth poverty rates than the other two household types. Disparities between elderly and child households are particularly large, with child households having pennies on the dollar for every dollar of elderly wealth. These disparities increased over time, except in the early 2020s, when gaps narrowed. Like income, wealth is another economic context in which child households compare unfavorably to households without children and elderly households. However, government spending during the pandemic coincided with increases in child household wealth and decreases in net worth poverty, suggesting that child wealth contexts are not fixed.

This study investigates the impact of inflation and exchange rate volatility on consumer purchasing behavior in Nigeria, employing a descriptive research approach and survey data gathered via Google Forms. The findings indicate that inflation substantially diminishes consumers' purchasing power, forcing households to prioritize essential products above discretionary expenditures and use coping methods such as opting for less expensive alternatives and reducing non-essential costs. Likewise, exchange rate fluctuations increase the expenses of both imported and domestically produced items, further burdening consumer finances and modifying consumption behaviors. The study underscores the resilience of Nigerian consumers, who confront these issues through adaptive strategies, however this may have enduring consequences for financial stability and product quality. This research, based on theoretical frameworks like Purchasing Power Parity and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, emphasizes the essential requirement for effective economic policies to control inflation and exchange rates. The study offers significant insights for policymakers and businesses to mitigate the socio-economic effects of economic instability on consumer welfare. Keywords: Inflation, Exchange Rate, Volatility, Consumer, Nigeria.

The increasing longevity of individuals, coupled with rising financial uncertainty, underscores the critical need for adequate household savings. Despite the importance of financial preparedness, nearly 50% of U.S. households nearing retirement (ages 55-64) lack sufficient savings (U.S. Federal Reserve, 2023). This study examines the relationship between life cycle variables, including expected longevity, financial knowledge, and health-related factors in shaping household savings. Using data from the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, we employ binary logistic regression to examine factors associated with household saving behavior. The Life Cycle Hypothesis (Ando &amp; Modigliani, 1963) provides the theoretical foundation, extended to incorporate expected lifespan, financial knowledge and health related factors as key predictors. Findings reveal that households with high subjective financial knowledge have 71% higher odds of saving, while smokers have 30% lower odds of saving. Additionally, socioeconomic disparities were found to be significant, with single females and Hispanic households exhibiting lower savings rates compared to their counterparts. These findings underscore the need for targeted programs and policies that enhance financial literacy and health, promoting long-term saving habits and healthy lifestyles, particularly among vulnerable demographic groups. The study contributes to personal finance by integrating cognitive, health, and demographic influences into household saving decisions.

ABSTRACTThis study utilizes data from seven waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances to investigate how financial planning advice moderates the relationship between self‐reported financial risk tolerance and two aspects of investment behavior: stock market participation and the proportion of financial wealth allocated to stocks. Regression analyses, which controlled for demographic and socio‐economic factors, indicated that individuals with the lowest self‐reported risk tolerance were significantly more likely to invest in stocks and allocate a larger share of their financial assets to equities when they received advice from a financial planner. This effect remained consistent regardless of whether stock market participation was measured through direct investments or indirect equity ownership via exchange traded funds (ETFs), mutual funds, or retirement accounts. In contrast, for individuals with high risk tolerance, the use of a financial planner had no significant impact on direct stock ownership and was associated with a reduction in the proportion of financial wealth allocated to directly held stocks. However, for households with moderate to high risk tolerance, financial planner use still increased both stock market participation and the share of wealth allocated to equities when indirect holdings through ETFs, mutual funds, or retirement accounts were included in the definition of stock investments. These findings suggest that financial planners guide moderately and highly risk‐tolerant investors away from direct stock ownership and toward more diversified equity investments.