Maine Eviction Report, 2019-2023
With support from John T. Gorman Foundation, Pine Tree Legal releases important information about rental evictions in Maine, 2019-2022.
Category: Wealth and Assets
Importance of Wealth to Family Well-Being: Seeding innovation to address the structural roots of inequality
Wealth and assets play a significant and often underestimated role in a family’s financial wellbeing and potential for future mobility, especially for households that are economically vulnerable, according to a new report co-released by the John T. Gorman Foundation and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
Clinic-based financial coaching with low-income families improved attendance to pediatric appointments and infant vaccination rates
A pilot study in Pediatrics explores whether embedding financial coaching for low-income families at their pediatric primary care clinic would impact attendance to pediatric preventive care appointments and infant vaccination rates. In this Los Angeles clinic-based approach, participating parents received financial coaching during their babies’ well-child visits. Through a randomized controlled trial, authors assessed pediatric … Read more
Boston Medical Center’s approaches family health through antipoverty programming
The latest issue of Health Affairs describes the implementation of a “medical-financial partnership” program called StreetCred at Boston Medical Center (BMC) as an example of an antipoverty strategy as a path to child and family health. At BMC, families are routinely screened for social determinants of health like employment status and housing stability. The BMC … Read more
Census Bureau reports on new Survey of Income and Program Participation data, finding racial disparities in retirement savings
The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2021 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) included some new questions specific to retirement preparation. Among age groups, they find that working-age baby boomers (ages 56 to 64) were the most likely to have a retirement account of some kind, with 58.1 percent having at least one account. Men were … Read more
Federal Reserve study documents why consumers carry credit card debt even when they have liquid assets: bills
Economists struggling to understand why consumers make the economically unsound choice to retain liquid assets while continuing to accrue interest on a credit card debt can turn to the new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, which demonstrates that people leave money in the bank to pay bills. Using data from the Diary … Read more
Subsidized housing during childhood linked with higher earnings in adulthood
A study from the American Economic Journal finds that participating in the Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV) program or public housing as a teenager is linked with higher earnings at age 26. The authors construct an ambitious and detailed longitudinal dataset drawing on confidential demographic, employment, and location data from the U.S. Census Bureau and administrative … Read more
Social Security narrows wealth gap between high- and low-income households
A working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston presents a new conceptualization of household wealth that accounts for the patterned availability of wealth components across the population. Specifically, the authors extend the definition of wealth beyond market-based assets to also include estimated pension and Social Security distributions, which are critical elements of retirement-financing … Read more
Analysis of multigenerational data shine further light on the widening of the Black-white poverty gap over time
Findings from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) reveal disproportionate multigenerational poverty among Black families compared to white families. When poverty is defined as the bottom fifth of earners, Black Americans make up 44 percent of poor adults in their 30s. The persistence of Black multigenerational poverty can be attributed to deeper poverty rates … Read more
Households receiving government benefits have 2% of the wealth, 89% the debt of counterparts without benefits
The Census Bureau reports on the 2017 wave of its Survey of Income and Program Participation, assessing wealth and debt among low-income households. The report quantifies median wealth of households participating in means-tested government benefit programs versus their counterparts without benefits, finding a massive gap between the two. Even excluding home equity, those receiving benefits … Read more