In economic research, income and wealth inequality are often measured using repeated cross-sections of data, but these measures provide an incomplete description of inequality when there are differences in life expectancy between demographic groups. On Thursday, November 14, 2024, the Economic Mobility Project of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago held a virtual event, Understanding Racial Disparities in Lifetime Earnings and Life Expectancy. Chicago Fed economist Ezra Karger shared his research, which uses census data to provide the first long-run estimates of lifetime earnings by race in the United States. His work explores the importance of life expectancy in the measurement of Black-White income inequality and how and why this ratio has experienced dramatic shifts over the past 100 years.

The research presentation was followed by a panel of experts. William Darity Jr., Sita Nataraj Slavov, Damon Jones, and Nicholas J. Hill discussed historical changes in racial disparities in income and life expectancy. The moderator was Jonnelle Marte, Federal Reserve and economics reporter with Bloomberg News.

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