An analysis of life-cycle accumulation of financial assets

This paper uses data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) to estimate age profiles for financial asset accumulation. While the CEX is not designed to estimate financial wealth, it has the advantage of being available on a consistent basis since 1980.

As the data set is not a panel, synthetic cohort techniques are used to analyse the dynamics of asset accumulation over the life cycle, while allowing for cohort and business cycle effects. It is shown that it is not possible to separately identify cohort and age effects in the level of financial assets. However, with the specification proposed, it is possible to identify all the parameters (except the intercept) of the age profile for the changes in financial assets.

Several measures of location are analysed, and several conditioning variables considered. The results seem to indicate a decline in the rate of financial asset accumulation in the last part of the life cycle. However, because the scale of this effect is not identified, these results cannot be used to address the issue of asset decumulation by the elderly.