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How to Strengthen Household Financial Resilience
August 11, 2021Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic and its economic consequences have laid bare the deeply rooted financial insecurity many Americans face daily. Many households are highly dependent upon earned income and have little to buffer an income loss due to business shutdowns… Read More »
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Financial Resilience in America
May 04, 2021This fact sheet provides a snapshot of the state of Americans’ financial resilience right before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Americans were unprepared to cover a mid-sized emergency expense, and there are considerable variations across groups with different… Read More »
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How Ordinary Consumers Make Complex Economic Decisions: Financial Literacy and Retirement Readiness
July 13, 2020This paper explores who is financially literate, whether people accurately perceive their own economic decision-making skills, and where these skills come from. Self-assessed and objective measures of financial literacy can be linked to consumers’ efforts to plan for retirement in… Read More »
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Financial Fragility in America
March 30, 2020In January 2020, about one-in-four Americans were financially fragile. Financial fragility is the inability to cope with a mid-size shock in a short period of time. It is a self-assessed measure of capacity to deal with financial shocks, regardless of… Read More »
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Financial Fragility in the U.S.: Evidence and Implications
April 15, 2018Summary: The capacity to cope with unexpected expenses is a crucial component of financial wellbeing. The lack of such preparedness is like balancing on a beam—a shock or unexpected financial adversity can immediately shake one off and it is hard to… Read More »
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Financial Capability in the United States 2016
July 15, 2016Summary: Financial capability is a multi-dimensional concept that encompasses a combination of knowledge, resources, access, and habits. The NFCS is designed to understand and measure a rich, connected set of perceptions, attitudes, experiences, and behaviors across a large, diverse sample in… Read More »
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Americans’ Troubling Financial Capabilities: A Profile of Pre-Retirees
July 08, 2016Summary: Many people envision a life of work that builds to comfortable and enjoyable retirement years. For previous generations, the financial security that marked that post–labor-force chapter hinged on how generous employers were with pensions or how well employers invested and… Read More »
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FIVE STEPS TO PLANNING SUCCESS: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM U.S. HOUSEHOLDS
December 17, 2014Abstract: In this paper, we design and field a low-cost, easily-replicable financial education program called “Five Steps,” covering five basic financial planning concepts that relate to retirement. We conduct a field experiment to evaluate the overall impact of “Five Steps” on a… Read More »