The Impact of Unconventional Monetary Policies on Gender and Racial Wealth Inequality: Evidence from the Large-Scale Asset Purchases in the United States.

  • This thesis investigates the impacts of large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs), which are an unconventional monetary policy (UMP) used by the Fed in the response to the 2008 global financial crisis and recession, on gender and racial wealth inequality in the US. After demonstrating that monetary policies have gendered and racial impacts and that none of these studies have yet considered UMPs, the thesis will then explain theoretically what the transmission channels of LSAPs to the wealth distribution are. Empirical studies show that LSAPs created a wealth effect, through increasing the price of some asset owned by households, primarily stocks prices, and to a lesser extent house prices. Current literature on the impact of LSAPs in the US is still in dissension over whether it increased net wealth inequality or not. However, there is ample evidence from the current gender and racial economic literature that the wealth distribution in the US is significantly unequal, and a hole in the literature on the impact of LSAPs on the highly gendered and racial US wealth distribution. The thesis then begins to fill in some of these gaps in the literature by investigating what has happened to the financial and non-financial wealth of households disaggregated by gender and race in the period of the LSAPs, and whether the LSAPs did contribute to or reinforce these wealth inequalities. Due to limitations in the data collection the thesis is not able to conclude that there was a net negative gender wealth inequality effect. Nevertheless, there is strong empirical evidence that the LSAPs did increase racial wealth inequality, due to white households disproportionately owning stocks and having higher rates on homeownership.

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Metadaten
Author:Francesca Rhys-Williams
Referee:Martina Metzger
Advisor:Gary Dymski
Document Type:Master's Thesis
Language:English
Date of first Publication:2019/12/20
Publishing Institution:Hochschulbibliothek HWR Berlin
Granting Institution:Hochschule für Wirtschaft und Recht Berlin
Date of final exam:2019/06/10
Release Date:2019/12/20
Page Number:83
Institutes:FB I - Wirtschaftswissenschaften / International Economics M.A.
Licence (German):License LogoUrheberrechtsschutz