U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Skip Header


Year-Apart Estimates of Household Net Worth from the Survey of Income and Program Participation

Written by:
Working Paper Number SEHSD-WP1988-16 or SIPP-WP-51

The difficulty of collecting accurate data on wealth in a household survey has long been recognized. The modern history of wealth surveys began with a 1946 survey sponsored by the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) and continued with the annual surveys of Consumer Finances conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan during the period 1947 to 1970. In the 1960-61 Survey of Consumer Expenditures, sponsored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), data on assets and liabilities were collected one year apart, enabling BLS to calculate the net change in assets and liabilities. In 1963 and 1964, the FRB sponsored what might be viewed as the most ambitious effort ever to obtain wealth and saving estimates from a household survey. The 1963 survey collected very detailed asset and liability data from a samp1e of approximately 2,500 households [Projector and Weiss, 1966]. The households were visited again one year later to obtain the data that were used in producing estimates of household saving [Projector, 1968]. A special feature of the 1963-64 survey was a design that sampled high-income households at a higher rate that other households. Other household surveys that collected a significant amount of data on household wealth included the FRB's 1977 Consumer Credit Survey [Durkin and Ellishausen, 1978]; the 1979 Survey of the President's Commission on Pension Policy [Cartwright and Friedland, 1985], and the 1979 Income and Survey Development Program [Pearl and Frankel, 1982; Radner, 1984].

Page Last Revised - October 8, 2021
Is this page helpful?
Thumbs Up Image Yes Thumbs Down Image No
NO THANKS
255 characters maximum 255 characters maximum reached
Thank you for your feedback.
Comments or suggestions?

Top

Back to Header