Racial Inequality in Financial Resilience
How do income instability and access to resources shape racial inequality? This project will use administrative data to construct the first estimates of financial resilience by race. Using anonymized data from millions of bank accounts to measure income and spending on a day-to-day basis, the researchers will study how households cope with difficult economic shocks such as job loss and measure financial resilience by whether household members cut back on grocery spending, skip doctors appointments, and miss bill payments. This project may uncover a new dimension of racial inequality, one with significant welfare and policy implications.
Principal Investigators: Peter Ganong (Associate Professor, Harris School of Public Policy), Damon Jones (Associate Professor, Harris School of Public Policy), Pascal Noel (Neubauer Family Professor of Finance)