Marriage, Assets, and Savings.

This paper explores the relationship between household type and asset accumulation. Households are distinguished principally along standard demographic lines whether they marry, divorce, separate or become widowed. To accomplish this goal, we rely on two household surveys with high quality wealth modules. The first, the Health and Retirement Survey HRS is ideal for depicting the nature and magnitude of wealth disparities across households in a relatively narrow age range. Wealth is one of the core HRS modules, and as a result, considerable survey resources were spent in improving the quality and inclusiveness of the asset information collected. The second survey is the Panel Study of Income Dynamics PSID which included wealth modules in its 1984, 1989, and 1994 waves. PSID data are useful not only since they cover the complete age span of households, but because they allow use to model changes in wealth holdings of individuals living in the same or in different types of households across time. Furthermore, the PSID provides information regarding households saving in various assets excluding any capital gains that they had in such important assets as a home, business, or the stock market.