Over the last decade or so, a substantial effort has gone into the design of a series of methodological investigations aimed at enhancing the quality of survey data on income and wealth. These investigations have largely been conducted at the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan,...

A characteristic feature of survey data on household wealth is the high incidence of missing data roughly one in three respondents who report owning an asset are unable or unwilling to provide an estimate of the exact amount of their holding. A partial solution to that problem is to devise a...

Over the last decade or so, a substantial effort has gone into the design of a series of methodological investigations aimed at enhancing the quality of survey data on income and wealth. These investigations have largely been conducted at the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan,...

Second home equity is an important component of both housing equity and net worth for the old population. It has been covered, implicitly or explicitly, across all waves of HRS and AHEAD surveys. But due to a skip-pattern error, not all households with second homes were asked detailed questions...

In the past decade, researchers have made substantial improvements to survey questions that allow them to obtain more accurate information from survey respondents about income and wealth. However, changing survey questions - even for the better - can create problems. For example, if we ask a...

Recent literature has documented a widening gap in mortality in the United States between individuals with high socioeconomic status (SES) and low SES. An important question is whether this trend will continue. In this paper we document trends and inequalities in the health status at ages 54 to...

State and local government pension plans cover about 19.5 million participants, and many participants are heavily reliant on these pensions for retirement income. Most of these plans, however, are underfunded. Based on data from the Health and Retirement Study, we examined the lifetime work...

Objectives: To describe the correlations between self-reported visual and hearing impairment and an index of global functional status. Design: Multivariate analyses of functional status based on cross sectional data from Wave 1 (1992) of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) controlling for...

Aging and health care are the emerging policy issues in the Third World. However, we currently do not have the data to address these issues because economic status and health have not been integrated into a single survey design. This article discusses the rationale for the principal features of...

This paper has two interrelated goals. First, it examines racial and ethnic disparities in health outcomes among older Americans using two important new data sets: the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) and the Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldes Old (AHEAD). Second, our research attempts...