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...

This article models respondent behavior in a financial survey with a framework explicitly integrating a respondent’s knowledge of and willingness to reveal his or her financial status. Whether a respondent provides a valid answer, a “don’t know”, or a “refusal” to a financial...

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...

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This paper attempts to confirm the life-cycle relationship that lower subjective survival probabilities should lead to less positively sloped consumption trajectories. I use the results of six waves of subjective survival probability questions in the HRS to construct an index of survival belief...

This study analyzes the extent to which an individual’s survival expectations influence his or her decision to claim social security benefits at an early age. We find that subjective survival probabilities capture meaningful behavioral responses to incentives for early Social Security claiming...

Using generalized method of moments on the covariance matrix, I test three models of consumption change on constructed consumption data from the Health and Retirement Study. Meant as a first step towards estimating life-cycle effects of subjective survival probabilities on consumption profiles,...

This paper investigates sample attrition in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We compare attrition behavior in two of the HRS cohorts: original HRS cohort and AHEAD cohort. We distinguish attrition due to death (passive attrition) from attrition due to other causes (active attrition),...

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,...