With the Foundation's support, the Urban Institute has published a report on the stagnating levels of wealth among younger Americans. Entitled "Lost Generations? Wealth Building Among Young Americans," the study shows that, contrary to historical wealth accumulation patterns, Americans under 40 are not richer than previous cohorts:

As a society gets wealthier, children are typically richer than their parents, and each generation is typically wealthier than the previous one at any given age. For example, near peak wealth accumulation in their mid-50s to mid-60s, those born in 1943–51 are wealthier than those born in 1934–42, who are wealthier than those born in 1925–33. This pattern does not hold for the younger among us. People born starting in 1952 no longer find their wealth above the prior cohort by 2010. Nor is the most recent 1970–78 cohort’s average above prior cohorts. Younger cohorts’ average wealth is simply no longer outpacing older cohorts.

Looking at it another way, 65- to 73-year-olds today have far more wealth than 65- to 73-year-olds did in 1983. More generally, the net worth of those 47 and older is roughly double that of someone the same age 27 years earlier. Today’s adults in their mid-30s or younger—the prime time for career and family formation—benefited little from the doubling of the economy since the early 1980s and have accumulated no more wealth than their counterparts 25 years ago.

In an interview with the New York Times, Signe-Mary McKernan, one of the study's authors, explained the implications of this worrying trend:

Strong and sustained job and wage growth would cure many of the ills facing younger workers, experts said. But their delayed or diminished wealth accumulation might still have a lasting impact on their finances.

“It’s a little bit of a tipping-point moment,” said McKernan. “If we don’t address it today, they might never catch up.”

For instance, the researchers said, if a person delayed the purchase of a home to age 40 instead of buying at age 30, that might result in a $42,000 loss in home equity by the time she reaches 60, given trends in wealth accumulation over the past few decades.

The study, available for download here, was funded as part of the Foundation's Great Recession initiative, a multi-year effort to assess the effects of the economic downturn on the economic, political, and social life of the country.