scholarly journals Income Volatility and the PSID: Past Research and New Results

2018 ◽  
Vol 108 ◽  
pp. 277-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Moffitt ◽  
Sisi Zhang

The PSID has major advantages for studying income volatility and, because of this, research using it has been responsible for major improvements in the methodology of studying income volatility. Its research on calendar trends finds a reasonably consistent pattern for phased but rising male earnings volatility since 1970. Female earnings volatility has declined and household income volatility has risen. Some other datasets find similar patterns but others do not, suggesting the need for more research. A new earnings volatility model is estimated on PSID men through 2014, showing similar patterns but with a large jump during the Great Recession.

Author(s):  
Karen Dynan ◽  
Douglas Elmendorf ◽  
Daniel Sichel

Abstract Using a representative longitudinal survey of U.S. households, we find that household income became noticeably more volatile between the early 1970s and the late 2000s despite the moderation seen in aggregate economic activity during this period. We estimate that the standard deviation of percent changes in household income rose about 30 percent between 1971 and 2008. This widening in the distribution of percent changes was concentrated in the tails. The share of households experiencing a 50 percent plunge in income over a two-year period climbed from about 7 percent in the early 1970s to more than 12 percent in the early 2000s before retreating to 10 percent in the run-up to the Great Recession. Households’ labor earnings and transfer payments have both become more volatile over time. As best we can tell, the rise in the volatility of men’s earnings appears to owe both to greater volatility in earnings per hour and in hours worked.


Author(s):  
Carla Blázquez-Fernández ◽  
David Cantarero-Prieto ◽  
Marta Pascual-Sáez

The financial crisis of 2008 precipitated the “Great Recession”. In this scenario, we took Spain as a country of study, because although it experienced significant negative shocks associated with macroeconomic variables (GDP or unemployment), its welfare indicators have been marked by limited changes. This study used data from waves 2 and 4 (years 2006–2007 and 2010–2012, respectively) of the Survey on Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Specifically, through logistic regressions we have analysed the effects of socioeconomic, demographic, health and “Great Recession” factors on the quality of life (QoL) of elders in Spain. Although QoL did not change too much during the “Great Recession”, the results confirmed the importance of several factors (such as chronicity) that affect the satisfaction with the QoL among the older people. In this regard, statistically significant effects were obtained for individual exposure to recession. Therefore, a decrease in household income in the crisis period with respect to the pre-crisis period would increase by 44% the probability of reporting a low QoL (OR = 1.44; 95% CI: 1.00–2.07). Furthermore, gender differences were observed. Health and socioeconomic variables are the most significant when determining individual QoL. Therefore, when creating policies, establishing multidisciplinary collaborations is essential.


Author(s):  
Robert Moffitt ◽  
Sisi Zhang

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has made more contributions to the study of income volatility than any other dataset in the United States. Its record of providing data for seminal research is unmatched. In this article, we first present the reasons that the PSID has made such major contributions to research on the topic. Then we review the major papers that have used the PSID to study income volatility, comparing their results to those using other datasets. Last, we present new results for income volatility among U.S. men through 2014, finding that both gross volatility and the variance of transitory shocks display a three-phase trend: upward trends from the 1970s to the 1980s, a stable period in the 1990s through the early 2000s, and a large increase during the Great Recession.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 648-694 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kusum Mundra ◽  
Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere

In this paper, we explore factors correlated with immigrant homeownership before and after the Great Recession. We focus solely on immigrants because of recent evidence that suggests homeownership rates declined less for immigrants than natives in the United States during the recession and onward. Specifically, we examine to what extent an immigrant's income, savings, length of stay in the destination country, citizenship status, and birthplace networks affected the probability of homeownership before the recession, and how these impacts on homeownership changed since the recession. We examine these questions using microdata for the years 2000–2012. Our results suggest that citizenship status, birthplace network, family size, savings, household income, and length of stay are significant for an immigrant's homeownership. In comparing the pre‐recession period to the period afterward, we find that the impact of birthplace networks on homeownership probabilities doubled while the impact of savings slightly declined.


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