TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE BLACK/WHITE WEALTH GAP

描述(改编自申请者的摘要)：已经写了很多 关于美国黑人和白人之间的收入差异。少得多 人们已经注意到了净资产的差异。因此，令人惊讶的是 关于种族差异的研究相对较少。 财富和几乎没有任何分析试图解释，而不是简单地 记录种族之间的财富差异。这个项目的目标是 通过评估各种可能的解释来填补这一空白 贫富差距。我们的第一个目标是比以前的工作更充分地刻画 两组财富和收入之间的统计关系。这里 我们强调观察结果的含义，即财富水平非常高 劳动收入的非线性。我们的初步计算表明，这些 考虑因素解释了很大一部分，但绝不是全部 财富观察。我们的第二个目标是关注 生命周期理论，扩展到允许在 家庭可以解释白人和黑人的积累行为，有条件的 论收入的终生模式与退休年龄的分布 和死亡率。生命周期理论表明，黑人和黑人之间的差异 白人的替代率、收入增长(包括内部和之间 世代)、预期寿命、退休年龄和资产回报率 应该是财富/收入比率差异的重要决定因素。这里 我们提出了一些列表和模拟，它们应该有助于 每个考虑因素的相对重要性。最后，我们的目标是 探索低财富水平对经济福祉的影响 黑人人口。我们将探讨在多大程度上极低的 黑人人口中的资产导致消费大幅下降(相对 对于白人)在退休时，以及这些低水平的 资产对子孙后代的继承财富具有影响 黑人。

DESCRIPTION (Adapted from applicant's abstract): A great deal has been written about differences in earnings between black and white Americans. Much less attention has been paid to differences in net worth. Thus it is surprising that there has been relatively little work that focuses on racial differences in wealth and virtually no analyses that attempt to explain, rather than simply document, wealth differences between the races. The goal of this project is to begin to fill this void by evaluating various possible explanations for the wealth gap. Our first aim is to characterize more adequately than previous work the statistical relationship between wealth and income for the two groups. Here we stress the implications of the observation that wealth levels are highly nonlinear in labor income. Our preliminary calculations suggest that these considerations explain a significant fraction, but by no means all, of the wealth observation. Our second aim is to focus on the extent to which life-cycle theory, extended to allow for altruistic transfers within the family' can explain the accumulation behavior of whites and blacks, conditional on the lifetime pattern of earnings and the distribution of ages of retirement and mortality. Life cycle theory suggests that differences between blacks and whites in replacement rates, earnings growth (both within and between generations), life expectancy, retirement age, and rates of return on assets ought to be important determinants of differences in wealth/income ratios. Here we propose a number of tabulations and simulations which should shed light on the relative importance of each of these considerations. Finally, we aim to explore the implications of low wealth levels for the financial well being of the black population. We will explore the extent to which the very low level of assets among the black population leads to sharp falls in consumption (relative to whites) at the time of retirement, and to what extent these low levels of assets have implications for the inherited wealth of future generations of blacks.