Measuring economic insecurity by combining income and wealth: an extended well-being approach

Abstract

In this paper, we propose the use of an extended well-being approach to assess economic insecurity. Our main purpose is to study its dimension and identify its main drivers in the United States by overcoming the dichotomy between income and wealth. To this end, we approximate an extended well-being measure that includes monetary resources from income and the potential stream from wealth, which can be understood as an emergency reserve to cope with future economic difficulties but could also be a source of financial distress due to fluctuations in asset holdings and prices. We find that economic insecurity levels are larger when considering our extended well-being variable than income alone. Household income and non-liquid assets appear to be the main drivers of economic insecurity, although part of the US population was able to obtain higher returns on non-liquid assets and maintain their income levels.