Americans remain largely unaware of the magnitude of economic inequality in the nation and the degree to which it is patterned by race. In the present research we exposed a community sample of respondents to one of three interventions designed to promote a more realistic understanding of the Black-White wealth gap. The interventions were developed to conform to best practices in messaging about racial inequality drawn from the social sciences, yet differed in the extent to which they highlighted a single story versus data-based trends in Black-White wealth inequality or both. The interventions that highlighted data versus only a single story of racial inequality were most effective in both shifting how people talk about racial wealth inequality—eliciting less speech about personal achievement—and, critically, improving accuracy in perceptions of the Black-White wealth gap. These increases in accuracy persisted up to 18 months following the intervention, though accuracy did decline across time. The initial findings from this study highlight how data can be leveraged, along with current recommendations in the social sciences, to promote more accurate understandings of the magnitude of racial inequality in society, laying the necessary groundwork for messaging about equity-enhancing policy.

A growing body of research documents the importance of wealth and the racial wealth gap in perpetuating inequality across generations. We add to this literature by examining the impact of wealth on child income. Our two stage least squares regressions reveal that grandparental and parental wealth have an important effect on the younger generation’s stock (first stage results), which in turn affects the younger generation’s household income (second stage results). We further explore the relationship between income and wealth by decomposing the child’s income by race. We find that the intergroup disparity in income is mainly attributable to differences in family background. These findings indicate that wealth is an important source of income inequality.

Data and code accompanying "The Racial Wealth Gap and the Role of Firm Ownership"This paper develops an overlapping generations model that isolates the impact of the U.S. racial wealth gap in 1962 on the long-run dynamics of wealth. The model predicts that one component of the initial gap, firm ownership, coupled with the intergenerational transfer of that ownership, results in a permanent wealth gap independent of other dimensions of inequality. This implies that even if all discrimination against black Americans had ceased upon the end of Jim Crow, the wealth gap would have persisted without a reparations policy addressing the fact that the initial firm ownership gap arose in the first place.

PSID data extract for computing active saving rates of Black and white Americans during 1984-2019.

The City partnered with Burke, Inc. and The Voice of Your Costumer research and marketing firms to conduct a statistically significant survey of over 1,000 residents, including 500 Black/ African American residents to understand barriers around reaching financial freedom. The survey insights uncovered racial disparities around job mobility, housing (rental and homeownership), debt and consumer protection, banking and financial access, and financial planning and coaching.

The Biden-Harris Administration released a plan to cancel federal student loans for 43 million borrowers on August 24, 2022. While the Supreme Court struck down the Biden-Harris' student debt relief plan on June 30, 2023, the White House is now planning to use the Higher Education Act of 1965, a federal law that governs the student loan program, to bring about relief for student borrowers. This article estimates the potential impact of broad-based student debt relief on racial and ethnic wealth gaps. On average, federal student debt potentially eligible for relief explains 3% of the White-Black wealth gaps, suggesting that broad-based student debt relief could significantly mitigate racial wealth inequities.Note: This is data and code accompanying the article.

In the U.S., median household income rose from 51,570 U.S. dollars in 1967 to 80,610 dollars in 2023. In terms of broad ethnic groups, Black Americans have consistently had the lowest median income in the given years, while Asian Americans have the highest; median income in Asian American households has typically been around double that of Black Americans.

The data and programs replicating tables and figures from "Wealth of Two Nations: The U.S. Racial Wealth Gap, 1860-2020", by Derenoncourt, Kim, Kuhn, and Schularick are too large to host on the Harvard Dataverse. They are available for download here instead: https://hu.sharepoint.com/:f:/s/HarvardEconomicsDatasets/Eq4g3n5WstlBvdknSsAI_FYBVNFV2trgP1It-Wv0rb9G3w?e=axHfn0 They are also hosted by the authors on openICPSR: https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/194203/version/V1/view Please see the ReadMe_DKKS_QJE_2023 file for additional details.

This statistic shows the median household wealth in the United States in 2016, by race. In 2016, the median Black household wealth was 17,600 U.S. dollars.

Replication data and code for Ellora Derenoncourt, Chi Hyun Kim, Moritz Kuhn, Moritz Schularick, Wealth of Two Nations: The U.S. Racial Wealth Gap, 1860–2020, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2023;, qjad044, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjad044

Graph and download economic data for Net Change in Total Assets by Race: White, Asian, and All Other Races, Not Including Black or African American (CXUCHGASSETLB0902M) from 1984 to 2023 about change, asian, white, Net, assets, and USA.

"Neighborhood Financial Health (NFH) Digital Mapping and Data Tool provides neighborhood financial health indicator data for every neighborhood in New York City. DCWP's Office of Financial Empowerment (OFE) also developed NFH Indexes to present patterns in the data within and across neighborhoods. NFH Index scores describe relative differences between neighborhoods across the same indicators; they do not evaluate neighborhoods against fixed standards. OFE intends for the NFH Indexes to provide an easy reference tool for comparing neighborhoods, and to establish patterns in the relationship of NFH indicators to economic and demographic factors, such as race and income. Understanding these connections is potentially useful for uncovering systems that perpetuate the racial wealth gap, an issue with direct implications for OFE’s mission to expand asset building opportunities for New Yorkers with low and moderate incomes. This data tool was borne out of the Collaborative for Neighborhood Financial Health, a community-led initiative designed to better understand how neighborhoods influence the financial health of their residents.

Reparations for African Americans reflect both material concerns aimed at eliminating the Black-White racial wealth gap and symbolic political aspirations, including the end of structural racism. But do material or symbolic considerations drive policy evaluations across racial and partisan divides? What knowledge and experiences undergird processes through which individuals weigh the symbolic importance of a policy against its actual benefits? Leveraging a set of 41 in-depth interviews with Black and White residents of Evanston, Illinois—the first municipality in the U.S. to approve a publicly-funded reparations-related ordinance—we highlight a mechanism through which individuals develop their opinions about reparations: political socialization. Black interviewees linked their understanding of reparations to robust financial compensation while White Democrats viewed their support for Evanston’s policy as symbolic of their longstanding, affective commitments to racial equality. Drawing from these observations, we present a framework highlighting policy attributes that frame how different constituencies respond to reparations-related policies. We test this framework using a conjoint experiment about reparations policies fielded in the 2022 Cooperative Election Study. We find Americans—especially White Republicans—possess less familiarity about reparations and remain strongly opposed to these policies, regardless of the form they take. While White Democrats are more familiar with reparations and more supportive of policies mirroring Evanston’s, Black Americans—those who are most familiar with reparations—support direct cash payments regardless of their political identification.

The statistic shows the distribution of U.S. millionaires in 2013, by race and ethnicity. As of 2013, about 76 percent of U.S. millionaires were White/Caucasian.

Additional information on racial income inequality

The issue of racial inequality in regards to income and wealth has been a problem through the entirety of the history of the United States. The statistic above demonstrates how the percentage of millionaires that identify as Black/African Americans is disproportionate to the share of the population overall. While the disproportionate number of millionaires demonstrates an undesirable degree of income inequality it is at the bottom of the wealth ladder within American society that the issue is most pressing. The overrepresentation of African Americans in contrast to the population in unemployment statistics are cause for concern on the part of the government and society as a whole. In 2014, nearly 25 percent of surveyed families who placed themselves in the income bracket of under ten thousand dollars identified as black.

The percentage of non-white female business owners perhaps demonstrates that barriers to wealth exist but are diminished in unison. As barriers to wealth generation are removed for women, similar barriers are also being broken to allow for greater equality in the economic opportunities offered across the population of the United States. A central issue for policy makers is the time delay associated with policies aimed at reversing these inequalities. This was reflected in the 2015 Democratic and Republican presidential primary campaigns. Despite many major candidates discussing the issue none put forward meaningful proposals to address the problem. Even Senator Bernie Sanders who made addressing income inequality the cornerstone failed to separate the issue from income inequality generally. However, the global attention gained by movements such as ‘Black Lives Matter’ shows issues of racial inequality are prominent in the discourse of sections of the wider population if not forming a cornerstone of the political discourse in the United States.

Data on household wealth in Great Britain by ethnic group. Includes total, property, financial, physical and private pension wealth by age, region, household composition and housing tenure.

In 2023, the Gini index for Black households in the United States stood at 0.5, which was higher than the national index that year. The Census Bureau defines the Gini index as “a statistical measure of income inequality ranging from zero to one. A measure of one indicates perfect inequality, i.e., one household having all the income and the rest having none. A measure of zero indicates perfect equality, i.e., all households having an equal share of income.”

Home ownership persists as the primary way that families build wealth. Housing researchers and advocates often discuss the racial home ownership gap, particularly for Black and Hispanic households (Urban Institute, Pew Hispanic Center). Historical policies such as redlining, steering, and municipal underbounding have effects that stay with us today.This map shows the overall home ownership rate and the home ownership rate by race/ethnicity of householder in a chart in the pop-up. Map is multi-scale showing data for state, county, and tract.This map uses these hosted feature layers containing the most recent American Community Survey data. These layers are part of the ArcGIS Living Atlas, and are updated every year when the American Community Survey releases new estimates, so values in the map always reflect the newest data available.

In the third quarter of 2024, the top ten percent of earners in the United States held over ** percent of total wealth. This is fairly consistent with the second quarter of 2024. Comparatively, the wealth of the bottom ** percent of earners has been slowly increasing since the start of the *****, though remains low. Wealth distribution in the United States by generation can be found here.

Replication data for "Racial Segregation in Housing Markets and the Erosion of Black Wealth"