Researchers know a lot about household income because the topic is well-studied and has huge implications for financial health. But what about wealth, a family's assets minus their liabilities? Much less is known about wealth, even though it's also critically important.

A new Federal Reserve Bank of Boston survey of more than 5,000 families – called Mass ECHOS – gives a detailed look at household wealth in Massachusetts.

A report on the survey examines median family net wealth in a variety of demographic breakdowns, including age, race, geography, and education. It also measures which families have sufficient wealth to handle routine but difficult expenses, such as a car repair or a move. We discuss the report with the Boston Fed’s Prabal Chakrabarti and Beth Mattingly, two of the people most responsible for making Mass ECHOS happen.

The paper on the survey, titled “Family wealth in Massachusetts,” was co-authored by Mattingly, Sara Chaganti, Michael Evangelist, Marija Bingulac, and Gracie L. Griffin.

Read an article about Mass ECHOS and its results: Boston Fed report offers detailed picture of family wealth in Massachusetts.

For more interviews and analysis of the economy in New England and nationwide, visit BostonFed.org/SixHundredAtlantic.aspx. Subscribe to our email list to stay updated on new episodes.

Jay Lindsay:

Researchers know a lot about household income because the topic is so well studied and has such huge implications for financial health. But what about wealth – simply a family's assets minus their liabilities? Much less is known about wealth, even though it's also critically important. For instance, wealth offers an important buffer in emergencies and it's essential to fueling investment.

A new survey published by the Boston Fed gives an unprecedented and detailed look at household wealth in Massachusetts. The study is called the Massachusetts Economic Conditions and Household Opportunity Survey. That's Mass ECHOS for short.

The survey of more than 5,000 families in Massachusetts reports median net wealth in a variety of demographic breakdowns, including age, education level, race, and place. It also reveals wealth gaps between respondents in the various subsets. Whites and Asians have far more wealth than Blacks and Hispanics. Rural residents have much more wealth than people who live in cities. Highly educated people and homeowners have far more wealth than people without degrees and renters.

So, the Mass ECHOS survey collected some compelling data, and two of the people most responsible for making it happen are with us today. Prabal Chakrabarti is the Boston Fed's community affairs officer and Beth Mattingly led the team that conducted the survey. Thanks to both of you for being with us today.

Prabal Chakrabarti:

Thank you, Jay.

Beth Mattingly:

Thanks, Jay.

Jay Lindsay:

Prabal, this all started in 2022, so it was a multi-year project. Can you tell me why the bank undertook such an extensive survey?

Prabal Chakrabarti:

As part of the U.S. central bank, the Boston Fed has a really important mandate from Congress around full employment and stable prices. So, in service of that mandate, we really need to understand the economic conditions of households. How are people faring? And so, this survey is a way to look at a key aspect of that, people's wealth.

Jay Lindsay:

Why do you think it's important to conduct surveys like this one?

Prabal Chakrabarti:

The Fed looks at a lot of data to understand the economy. Looking especially at wealth, it's one of the gauges on the dashboard to see how people are faring, how families and their household economic conditions are doing. And so, this survey provides that kind of data across different geographies and demographic groups, and it gives us a real snapshot of the commonwealth.

The Fed uses other data and surveys around wealth nationally, but this is a first-of-its-kind survey with this rigor and coverage to really give this picture for a state.

And so, we're very excited to have this out to foster a dialogue and a conversation about the results, about what they mean and the extent to which they reflect that people are able to achieve economic opportunity to be able to get a job if they're looking for a job or find a better job and be able to manage everyday household expenses and even unexpected expenses.

Jay Lindsay:

And the Boston Fed, we've certainly looked at wealth before, haven't we?

Prabal Chakrabarti:

Yes. Conducting surveys like this is part of a longstanding tradition within the Boston Fed of looking at data and research to understand the economy. Thinking about wealth specifically, the Boston Fed conducted a different survey of wealth 10 years ago with a smaller sample and different methods. But this survey goes statewide. It has a larger sample. It looks across a broader set of demographic groups. It has information on Gateway Cities as a whole. It looks at rural, it looks at urban. It asks some really good questions about assets and debt and really gets into some of the details and some of the nuance.

Jay Lindsay:

Now the Boston Fed, we had some partners with us on this effort. Can you talk about them for a second?

Prabal Chakrabarti:

Absolutely. They're crucial in this effort. Our partners included the Boston Foundation and its community partners: The Barr Foundation, the Eastern Bank Foundation, and the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.

Jay Lindsay:

Great. So, the report on the survey, it makes it very clear that this is what it's called in the report – a descriptive analysis. It's not causal. In other words, it's not diagnosing anything. It's giving a point in time picture. Can you expand a little on that?

Prabal Chakrabarti:

It's important first when we think about a snapshot to say this is not about any trend over a fixed period of time. The survey population includes everyone from people who've been here whose families have been here for generations and have lived here for decades to someone who may have moved to the commonwealth the year before to work or to study.

It's also important to understand that this isn't, in sort of in the economist parlance, it's not causal. It's not going to show exactly what the driver was of something or the cause of the results that we find. It's descriptive. It paints a picture of how households are faring as of 2025 here in the commonwealth.

Beth Mattingly:

The thing that I would add, beyond not being causal, it also doesn't look beyond broad trends. We really wanted to put out an initial report that highlighted what's happening for different groups across the commonwealth, but we didn't look at how the characteristics varied.

Right? So, everyone has an age, an education status, a racial identity, a family composition. But we looked at those independently without accounting for underlying differences in those characteristics by group.

Jay Lindsay:

Thanks for that, Beth. I definitely want to get to the results of the survey in a minute, but first, Beth, can you tell me a little bit more about how the Mass ECHOS survey was conducted, how it all happened?

Beth Mattingly:

So, the Boston Fed research team put together the survey instrument, the questions that people would be asked, many years before the survey was implemented, borrowing from other surveys and adapting questions for our state. We then worked closely with Mathematica, a survey research firm that the Boston Foundation contracted with. And over 30,000 households in Massachusetts were mailed an invitation to participate in the survey.

We got over 5,000 responses, and most people responded to a custom URL, to a survey online. Some people opted instead to fill it out in pen and paper and mail that back. And an even smaller share were visited by survey workers from Mathematica to fill it out on the spot.

Jay Lindsay:

You just mentioned the pool being 5,000. Can you give me some perspective on that number, what it means in terms of robustness of the survey?

Beth Mattingly:

That number is more than 10 times the sample of the study referenced 10 years ago and is on par with the sample size for the survey of consumer finances that the Board collects. Now, the Board collects that robust sample for the nation so they can really talk about what's happening across that country. So having a similar sample size for our state is really exciting because it will allow us to have greater precision in our estimates for different groups and their wealth holdings.

Jay Lindsay:

So, let's get into results. One of the surveys top-line numbers of that median family net wealth in Massachusetts was $374,000. Can you put that number into context for me?

Beth Mattingly:

So, that is the midpoint of if we took all the families that we have data on and ordered them from highest to lowest, that is the midpoint value, meaning half the families in the state have net wealth above that $374,000 value and half the families have below that.

Jay Lindsay:

Okay. I got that. The number itself, 374,000, it seems pretty high. Can you give me some context on that as well?

Beth Mattingly:

Absolutely. It is higher than estimates for the nation, though those aren't directly comparable. But that isn't surprising, given what we know about Massachusetts. Massachusetts has a healthy economy. We are a highly educated population. There's a large concentration of doctors and lawyers and business folks and financial folks. And so, it's not surprising with our state's high income that people are able to set aside quite a bit of money for their wealth.

Jay Lindsay:

I think it might be useful here to just kind of nail down the metric a little bit. I know at the top I talked about family wealth, assets minus liabilities. But what we're talking about here when you talk about family net wealth, we're talking about value of a home, a car, liabilities, mortgage, whatever. Can you get into some specifics about what you're looking at?

Beth Mattingly:

As you said, the value of their home, any value in vehicles, boats, cash on hand, savings, art, cryptocurrency. So, as many things as we can capture that add value to that household's budget. And then on the other side, we look at the debts. So, student loan debt, credit card debt, medical debt, legal debt, the whole host of things that would detract, that would take away from that balance sheet. And so, we subtract those debts or those liabilities from the total asset value to come up with a net wealth amount.

We looked at median wealth instead of average family wealth, because average wealth is much more influenced by high values. Being a state that does have some very wealthy individuals, we wanted to make sure that we got a sense broadly of what was happening across the state. So, that mean value, because there are some extremely rich folks in this state, is much higher than the median. And the median we felt was a better measure of the central tendency.

Jay Lindsay:

The survey reveals some wealth gaps, and I want to talk about a few of those now. First, we see that, as I mentioned at the top, whites and Asians have significantly more wealth than Blacks and Hispanics. Can you discuss those results?

Beth Mattingly:

As we mentioned before, we didn't look at why that is, but I can say from prior research that that is not surprising. That is the pattern. The specific numbers are Massachusetts, unique to Massachusetts, but those patterns of higher wealth among white and Asian families and lower wealth among Black and Latino families are common.

There's a vast body of literature that looks at why these differences exist. And some of it is attributable to different characteristics, like different incomes that they could set aside or different levels of education attainment, but some of it is also due to different returns to those characteristics. So, a college degree may not mean the same thing for every group.

Jay Lindsay:

You know, another stat that stood out to me was that rural residents have significantly more family wealth than people living in cities. So, median family net wealth for rural families was $465,000. And that's more than four times the 110,000 for families living in cities. Can you give me some perspective on this?

Beth Mattingly:

Again, our data don't speak directly to this, the data in the report. But things I thought about when I saw that number are, "What are we thinking about when we define rural/suburban – which also has relatively high wealth – and central cities?" For that analysis, the city is not the Greater Boston area, as it is when we look at Boston in the report. It is the city of Boston. And we know that there's still great variety, but not all of the wealth in the area is concentrated in the city. And we have very wealthy suburbs around the area.

And then the rural places that we look at have a variety of different characteristics. There are some very wealthy people who have chosen to live in more rural parts of our state, which may be still quite accessible to the city or to other amenities. So, I think it's not entirely surprising.

Prabal Chakrabarti:

When we think about rural Massachusetts, a lot of people have the mental image of a particular struggling rural community. Just important to note there's a lot of different kinds of rural communities. And so, it's important for any category to look at the ranges and think about the diversity that exists within that particular category on any characteristic.

Beth Mattingly:

I would just add to that. I talked about Boston and the central city before. Many of the cities in our area, including many of the Gateway Cities, are far less wealthy. So, I think that drives some of the difference as well.

Jay Lindsay:

Thanks for that. I appreciate that. I wanted to talk about another stat in there. The Mass ECHOS survey, it seems to highlight the importance of home ownership and educational attainment in building wealth. And I say that because I thought it was striking that homeowners reported 527 times more wealth than renters. Also, families with graduate degrees had 86 times more wealth than families with no member who had a degree higher than a high school diploma. Can you discuss these results?

Beth Mattingly:

When I think about who holds graduate degrees and the types of jobs that they have, I think about our doctors, our lawyers, our business folks. These are people who are very high earners and are probably able to set aside more of their earnings to build wealth. We also know that there's generational transmission of wealth and opportunity. So, these people may come from wealthier families who are able to support them through higher ed and make professional degrees attainable.

In terms of home ownership, I think a lot of people's primary wealth is in their home equity. And that's one of the reasons why people buy homes to accumulate over time. And whereas renters pay every month and don't realize a return from that, homeowners often accumulate wealth. In the Commonwealth, we've seen the takeoff in home values over the past several years where people have really amassed quite a bit of equity in their homes.

Prabal:

With all of these things, it's important to underline again, this is a descriptive study. So, it doesn't say that home ownership will necessarily result in great wealth, looking forward, or holding a graduate degree. It's just this is what the data find. Other scholars or other researchers can look closely at a whole host of variables to try to make a more thorough analysis of whether engaging in a particular activity today results in greater wealth tomorrow.

Jay Lindsay:

Thanks for clarifying that. I want to move off of the wealth gap stats, and I want to talk about another aspect of the survey. You guys also looked at the ability of respondents to pay certain expenses, and two of the expenses that were in the report, car repairs and moving expenses. I want to ask you about why you did that and what you found.

Prabal Chakrabarti:

Our mandate as the Fed is around maximum employment and stable prices. Drilling down on that employment, if you think about what it takes to have a job or to be able to find a job if you're looking for one, you need access to be able to get to that job. And in Massachusetts, like a lot of places, that means a car. Your car can have an unexpected breakdown or need a repair. What we found is in Massachusetts, about 18% of families could not come up with enough money to be able to fix that car. That puts their job at risk if they're not able to get to work on time.

If you look at being able to move to a better job, if you get this great opportunity, that will require, if you're a renter, a security deposit, first and last month's rent, that's a sizable sum in our state. It runs a little over $9,000. About two-thirds of current renters, if they got an opportunity like that, wouldn't be able to afford it. So, the bottom line there is that not having wealth can affect your ability to get a job if you're looking for one or to get a better job.

Jay Lindsay:

Thanks for that, Prabal. We kind of hit on this, you've both kind of hit on this I think earlier in the conversation, but I want to talk about this, just clarify a little bit more. The report is pretty clear that as robust as the Mass ECHOS survey is, the results should be interpreted with some caution. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Beth Mattingly:

So, these results are from a survey, and they're based on self-reports from 5,000 people reporting about their families across the state. They're subject to any errors in remembering values or errors in reporting them. And it's possible that our sample missed certain types of people or could not be perfect. So, it's important to keep in mind that these are survey estimates. They're likely values.

Despite these limitations, these are really good data. We were able with our community partners to use the gold standard in survey research to do a random, stratified sample of the state, and we got a really great response to the survey. So, we're really excited about these data and have pretty good confidence in our ability to give great information about wealth that has heretofore been unavailable for Massachusetts.

Jay Lindsay:

Obviously, this was a major undertaking, multi-year, thousands of families, but you've made the case here that it was an important undertaking. My question: Are you planning to regularly update the study or do related studies or follow-ups? What's next here?

Prabal Chakrabarti:

We're not currently planning to do an update. When you think about, again, it's a snapshot of how Massachusetts families and households are faring in this economy. And so, we think again about the importance of stakeholders having a discussion about the economic conditions that help people get a job or find a job if they're looking for one.

Beth Mattingly:

I just want to emphasize how rich these data are. In the report, we really provide a broad overview of how different populations are faring in terms of their wealth holdings. The appendices offer much richer data. We're really excited to engage with people across the state about what these data show and how they might be useful. Beyond that, though, there's much more that we can analyze. And in the months and years ahead, we will be engaging with these data and asking different questions and learning new things about wealth in Massachusetts.

Jay Lindsay:

All right. Well, we'll look forward to what is coming. Beth and Prabal, thank you so much for taking some time with us today.

Beth Mattingly:

Thanks so much, Jay.

Prabal Chakrabarti:

Thank you, Jay.

Jay Lindsay:

The report on the MassECHOS survey is called "Family wealth in Massachusetts," and you can find it on bostonfed.org. Check out bostonfed.org/six-hundred-atlantic, where you can listen to interviews and our podcast seasons. You can also subscribe to our email list to stay up to date on new episodes. And please remember to rate, review, share, and subscribe to Six Hundred Atlantic on your favorite podcast app. I'm Jay Lindsay, signing off on another episode of Six Hundred Atlantic. Thanks for listening.