1.
J Econ Soc Meas
; 44(2-3): 117-139, 2019.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-33911341
ABSTRACT
Survey measures of household wealth often incorporate measurement error. The resulting excess variability in the first difference in wealth makes meaningful statistical inference difficult on changes in household-level wealth. We study the effects of two methods intended to reduce this problem: Asset verification confronts respondents with large discrepancies between wealth reports from the current wave and from the previous wave. Cross-wave imputation uses adjacent wave information in the imputation procedures for missing data. In the U.S. Health and Retirement Study, the corrections from asset verification substantially reduced wave-to-wave changes in wealth. The cross-wave imputations also reduced variation, but to a lesser extent.