-
-
The New York Innovation Center bridges the worlds of finance, technology, and innovation and generates insights into high-value central bank-related opportunities.
Do you have a request for information and records? Learn how to submit it.
Learn about the history of the New York Fed and central banking in the United States through articles, speeches, photos and video.
-
-
-
The Governance & Culture Reform hub is designed to foster discussion about corporate governance and the reform of culture and behavior in the financial services industry.
Need to file a report with the New York Fed? Here are all of the forms, instructions and other information related to regulatory and statistical reporting in one spot.
The New York Fed works to protect consumers as well as provides information and resources on how to avoid and report specific scams.
-
-
-
The New York Innovation Center bridges the worlds of finance, technology, and innovation and generates insights into high-value central bank-related opportunities.
The growing role of nonbank financial institutions, or NBFIs, in U.S. financial markets is a transformational trend with implications for monetary policy and financial stability.
The New York Fed offers the Central Banking Seminar and several specialized courses for central bankers and financial supervisors.
-
-
-
The Economic Inequality & Equitable Growth hub is a collection of research, analysis and convenings to help better understand economic inequality.
The Governance & Culture Reform hub is designed to foster discussion about corporate governance and the reform of culture and behavior in the financial services industry.
-
May 1, 2001
NOTE TO EDITORS
Stocks in the Household Portfolio: A Look Back at the 1990s, the latest edition of the New York Fed's Current Issues in Economics and Finance, is online.
Economists Joseph Tracy and Henry Schneider argue that exceptionally high returns on stocks—rather than aggressive investment behavior—accounted for much of the increased importance of stocks as a household asset in the 1990s.
Countering the view that vast numbers of Americans were eagerly buying up stocks during the period, Tracy and Schneider suggest that the average household reacted to market developments "sluggishly." According to Tracy and Schneider, most households that owned some stocks during the period did not rush to buy more and most households that held no stocks refrained from acquiring them.
Using data on individual households from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, Tracy and Schneider estimate that the average share of household assets devoted to stocks increased from 5.0 percent in 1989 to 11.6 percent in 1998. Their statistical analysis shows that 53 percent of this rise was attributable to the high returns on stocks. Changes in investment behavior, by contrast, accounted for only about 18 percent of the rise in the average household equity share.
Tracy and Schneider find that three other factors contributed modestly to the increased prominence of stocks as a household asset:
-
the vast number of "baby boomers" (age 40 to 59) providing for retirement,
-
the broad improvement in the population’s education level, and
-
the restructuring of retirement plans to allow workers to invest their contributions in equity funds.
Having shown that most households responded quite passively to the high equity returns of the 1990s, Tracy and Schneider suggest that the typical household may behave in a similarly languid fashion if market returns over the current decade drop below their historical average. The average household equity share is likely to fall, according to Tracy and Schneider, but by less than it would if investors as a group were hastily abandoning the markets.
Contact: Douglas Tillett or Steven Malin
