In this report, the JPMorgan Chase Institute uses administrative bank account data to measure income and spending volatility and the minimum levels of cash buffer families need to weather adverse income and spending shocks. Inconsistent or unpredictable swings in families’ income and expenses...

As the connection between financial capability and social mobility is made evident, both public and private actors are increasingly interrogating the drivers of personal financial health and investing in the innovation of products and services designed to improve the condition of economically...

For many, homeownership is a vital part of the American dream. Buying a home represents one of the largest lifetime expenditures for most homeowners, and the mortgage has generally become the financing instrument of choice. For many families, their mortgage will be their greatest debt and their...

This report from the JPMorgan Chase Institute digs deeper into the demographics and sources of income volatility and provides an unprecedented look at the impact of the Online Platform Economy. This analysis relies on high-frequency data from a randomized, anonymized sample of 1 million Chase...

People manage their money in a variety of different ways, sometimes in ways that others fail to understand, but that work well for them. The research in this new report focuses on one of those ways: informal saving. Informal saving can take many forms: saving in cash at home (sometimes literally...

The JPMorgan Chase Institute has assembled data assets and perspectives on income and spending volatility over the last three years and examined the impacts of extraordinary income changes from job loss and extraordinary expense changes, notably from medical payments. Here we take a holistic view...

Americans experience tremendous income volatility, and that volatility is on the rise. Income volatility matters because it is hard to manage. The typical household faces a shortfall in the financial buffer necessary to weather this volatility. Moreover, the decline in real wages since 2009 for all...

In this inaugural report, researchers from the JPMorgan Chase Institute analyzed proprietary data from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to determine how income and consumption fluctuate on a monthly and a yearly basis. Drawing from detailed transaction information for nearly 30 million customers, we...