226 posts on "Household Finance"
May 6, 2026
Same Shock, Different Roads? A K‑Shaped Pattern at the Pump
In March 2026, energy prices surged to a four-year high, driven by the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. In this Liberty Street Economics post, we use the new consumer spending module of the Economic Heterogeneity Indicators to analyze recent changes in nominal and real gas consumption across different income groups. We find that households had very different experiences with gasoline spending: in March, high-income households increased nominal spending the most and kept real consumption essentially unchanged, while low-income households decreased real consumption of gasoline but still saw sharply increased nominal spending because of the rise in gas prices. Therefore, with the sharp increases in gasoline prices in March, a K-shaped pattern in gasoline consumption emerged—showing faster consumption growth for high-income households relative to low-income households. These gasoline consumption patterns qualitatively match those following the increase in energy prices at the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war in spring 2022, even though the gap in consumption trends during the current episode is quantitatively larger.
May 1, 2026
Explaining the K‑Shaped Economy: What’s Behind the Divide?
In our companion post, we used a new module of our Economic Heterogeneity Indicators (EHIs) to shed light on how recent retail spending growth has been driven by high-income households. This fact is consistent with the popular press’s idea of a “K-shaped economy” in which higher-income households experience faster growth in spending than lower-income households. In this post, we dive deeper into the reasons behind this divergence by analyzing for which goods this trend holds true and ask whether it can be explained by changes in wages, inflation, or wealth. We find that, since 2023, wealth has increased the most for high-income households, while inflation has risen the most for low-income households, with both factors helping explain the fact that real retail spending rose the most for high-income households. In contrast, earnings display a more mixed pattern, though earnings of the highest earners have grown more rapidly than earnings of the lowest earners.
Posted at 10:01 am in Household Finance, Inequality, K-Shaped Economy, Microeconomics | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tracking the K‑Shaped Economy: Who’s Driving Spending?
Aggregate real consumer spending has risen solidly since 2023. However, it is less clear how widely shared this improvement has been across all segments of society. This is important because systematic heterogeneity may mask the dependence of aggregate growth on a relatively small group of households and thus conceal macroeconomic risks. In this post, we use consumer spending data recently added to the Economic Heterogeneity Indicators (EHIs) and find that retail spending growth has been driven by high-income households—those earning more than $125,000 per year. In the popular press, the phenomenon of higher-income households growing at a faster rate than lower-income households has been referred to as the K-shaped economy. We find that consumption has exhibited a K-shaped economy since 2023, although not in the pre-COVID period or during the post-COVID recovery.
Posted at 10:00 am in Household Finance, Inequality, K-Shaped Economy, Microeconomics | Permalink | Comments (3)
April 13, 2026
What Millions of Homeowner’s Insurance Contracts Reveal About Risk Sharing
Housing is the largest component of assets held by households in the United States, totaling $48 trillion in 2025. When natural disasters strike, the resulting damage to homes can be large relative to households’ liquid savings. Homeowner’s insurance is the primary financial tool households use to protect themselves against property risk. Despite the economic importance of homeowner’s insurance, we know surprisingly little about how insurance contracts are actually designed with respect to property risk. In this post, which is based on our new paper, “Economics of Property Insurance,” we examine how homeowner’s insurance contracts are structured in practice. Using a new granular dataset covering millions of homeowner’s insurance policies, we document four striking patterns about coverage limits, deductibles, insurance pricing, and the distribution of property losses.
Posted at 7:00 am in Household Finance | Permalink
March 25, 2026
Sports Betting Is Everywhere, Especially on Credit Reports
Since 2018, more than thirty states have legalized mobile sports betting, leading to more than a half trillion dollars in wagers. In our recent Staff Report, we examine how legalized sports betting affects household financial health by comparing betting activity and consumer credit outcomes between states that legalized to those that have not. We find that legalization increases spending at online sportsbooks roughly tenfold, but betting does not stop at state boundaries. Nearby areas where betting is not legal still experience roughly 15 percent the increase of counties where it is legal. At the same time, consumer financial health suffers. Our analysis finds rising delinquencies in participating states, with spillover effects across state lines. What is more, even though the share of people taking up sports betting after legalization is small (roughly 3 percent of the population), overall credit delinquency rises by about 0.3 percentage points. Our findings suggest that sports betting can have dramatic implications for household financial stability.
February 10, 2026
Where Are Mortgage Delinquencies Rising the Most?
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Center for Microeconomic Data recently released its Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit for the fourth quarter of 2025, revealing continued growth in household debt balances. Aggregate household debt balances rose by $191 billion to reach $18.8 trillion, marking a $4.6 trillion increase since the end of 2019. Mortgage balances grew by $98 billion to $13.2 trillion, while credit card debt increased by $44 billion to $1.28 trillion. Credit card and auto loan delinquency rates appear to have stabilized, albeit at elevated rates. By contrast, the delinquency rate for mortgages—although still near low levels on a longer-term basis—has been steadily increasing over the past few years. Underlying these aggregate figures, however, there are notable differences in mortgage credit performance across places with different income levels and labor and housing market dynamics. This analysis, as well as the Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, are based on anonymous credit report data from Equifax.
February 3, 2026
A New Dataset for Consumer Spending in the New York Fed EHIs
We are enhancing our set of Economic Heterogeneity Indicators (EHIs) by adding a set of metrics on consumer spending with data presented by income, education, race and ethnicity, age, and urban status. The data will help track the evolution of aggregate behavior by analyzing the spending of specific groups in a more timely manner than is possible using public surveys.
December 23, 2025
Tariffs, Trade, and Tumbling Credit Scores: The Top 5 LSE Posts of 2025
Each year brings a new set of economic challenges: In 2025, major areas of focus included tariffs and trade tensions, as well as the financial pressures facing younger adults. New York Fed economists contributed insightful research on both topics—and readers took notice. In fact, all five of the year’s most-read posts on Liberty Street Economics analyzed aspects of these issues. Read on to see how the restoration of student loan data to credit reports affected borrowers’ credit scores, whether the costs of a college degree are still worth it, how businesses are responding to higher tariffs, and why the U.S. runs a trade deficit.
October 14, 2025
Consumption Sensitivity of Uncertain Households
Uncertainty is a key component of everyday economic decisions of consumers and, perhaps not surprisingly, it plays a central role in economic models. According to economic theory, forward-looking consumers rely on their expectations and perceived uncertainty when making economic decisions. Nevertheless, measuring the uncertainty that households actually perceive, and how it affects consumer behavior, is challenging. The probabilistic nature of the Survey of Consumer Expectations enables us to make progress on this subject and to construct household-specific time-varying uncertainty. In our recent Staff Report, we empirically show that the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is increasing and concave in perceived uncertainty. This novel empirical evidence poses a challenge for the conventional consumption-savings model with incomplete markets.
August 11, 2025
Who Is Still on First? An Update of Characteristics of First‑Time Homebuyers
Following the COVID-19 health crisis, home prices and mortgage rates rose sharply. This created concerns that first-time homebuyers (FTBs) would be disadvantaged and would lose ground. Earlier this year, we documented that the share of purchase mortgages by FTBs, as well as their share of home purchases, have actually increased slightly over the past couple of years. It appears that FTBs are holding their own in this challenging housing market. This raises the question of whether the characteristics of FTBs have changed. In a 2019 post, we described the characteristics of these buyers over the period from 2000 to 2016. In this post, we provide an update through 2024.
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