富人真的存得更多吗？——利用消费者财务调查、直接测量的终身收入和扩展财富概念回答一个老问题

Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C.ISSN 1936-2854 (Print)ISSN 2767-3898 (Online) Do the Rich Really Save More? Answering an Old QuestionUsing the SCF with Direct Measures of Lifetime Earnings and anExpanded Wealth Concept Elizabeth Llanes, Jeffrey Thompson, and Alice Henriques Volz 2025-097 Please cite this paper as:Llanes, Elizabeth, Jeffrey Thompson, and Alice Henriques Volz (2025). “Do the Rich Re-ally Save More?Answering an Old Question Using the SCF with Direct Measures ofLifetime Earnings and an Expanded Wealth Concept,” Finance and Economics Discus-sion Series 2025-097.Washington:Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System,https://doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2025.097. NOTE: Staff working papers in the Finance and Economics Discussion Series (FEDS) are preliminarymaterials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment.The analysis and conclusions set forthare those of the authors and do not indicate concurrence by other members of the research staff or theBoard of Governors. References in publications to the Finance and Economics Discussion Series (other thanacknowledgement) should be cleared with the author(s) to protect the tentative character of these papers. Do the Rich Really Save More? Answering an Old Question Using the Survey of ConsumerFinances with Direct Measures of Lifetime Earnings and an Expanded Wealth Concept* By Liz Llanes, Jeffrey Thompson, and Alice Volz Current Draft: September 24, 2025 The question of whether affluent households save at a higher rate than other parts of thedistribution has been asked by economists on numerous occasions since the 1950s. It is standardin this research to define affluent, or “rich,” households as those with high lifetime earnings orincome to better ground the empirical question in relevant theory. However, results in theliterature are mixed regarding whether rich households in fact save more than others, with somestudies suggesting a generally flat saving-rate profile across the distribution and otherssupporting the notion that the rich do indeed save more. Many empirical papers do not includedirect measures of lifetime earnings, relying instead on proxies. Additionally, few include thefull range of assets that low- and middle-income households depend on to finance theirretirement, and even fewer use data that include sufficient samples of households that are in theextreme upper tails of the wealth or income distribution. The primary contribution of this paperis to combine all three in an examination of U.S. households. We use the 2022 Survey ofConsumer Finances (SCF), which oversamples high-net-worth households, in combination withdirect estimation of lifetime earnings, to explore wealth-to-lifetime-earnings ratios—thecumulative impact of saving over time—across the lifetime earnings distribution. In addition, weuse an expanded measure of wealth that includes the asset value of defined benefit pensions andSocial Security, the public pension program. We find a steep gradient of saving when definingrich households by their lifetime earnings, which crucially includes business income inhousehold earnings. The steepness, though, does not manifest until the top deciles of lifetimeearnings. Recent research draws attention to the outsized contribution of capital gains in drivingwealth accumulation of the rich; when we remove unrealized capital gains from our metrics,however, the gradient of the wealth–lifetime-earnings ratio is reduced but not removed. 1.Introduction The question of whether the “rich”—typically identified as those with high levels of lifetimeincome or earnings—save a greater share of their income than less affluent households isrelevant to several important policy issues and to economic theory. For one, the answer to thequestion helps us better understand the root causes of inequalities in wealth and economic well-being across households. In an era when discussions of inequality are ubiquitous in media,research, and politics, understanding the factors driving observed wealth disparities has emergedas a first-order question. Does the variation in wealth emerge primarily from differences inlifetime earnings (LE) across households? Or does a higher rate of saving or investing play alarger role? More generally, these questions also have direct application to optimal tax theory,specifically whether capital income should be taxed. Some work in this area (for example, Saez2002) argues that if high-ability individuals save more, then taxation of capital income can bewelfare-improving. In addition, empirical estimates of differential saving behavior across thedistribution can be helpful for parametrizing heterogeneous agent macro models. Most of this literature references Friedman’s (1957a, 1957b) original research and discussion,highlighting the shortcomings of the intuitive link between affluence and rate of saving based onobservations of a single year of current period income. We expect households to smoothconsumption ove