Improved Wealth Measures in the Health and Retirement Study
Asset Reconciliation and Cross-Wave Imputation
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In this report, we present improved wealth measures for the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), which aim to reduce the effect of observation error on wealth levels and changes in wealth. The new wealth measures take account of the asset verification section in the HRS and use cross-wave information, most notably the value of the same asset in adjacent waves, in the imputation models, so imputed values better preserve serial correlation in the asset values. We document how we dealt with several methodological challenges in the implementation of these improvements. The corrections from the asset verification data reduce the standard deviations of wave-to-wave changes by substantial amounts (up to 57 percent for total wealth). The most important effect of the cross-wave imputations is a considerable reduction of the number of spikes and trenches (large changes in value followed by large changes back).
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Introduction and overview of the HRS asset elicitation
Chapter Two
Overview of section U
Chapter Three
Issues with implementing section U corrections
Chapter Four
Section U corrections of the previous wave
Chapter Five
Descriptive statistics of section U correction results
Chapter Six
Cross-wave imputation methodology
Chapter Seven
Descriptive statistics of cross-wave imputations
Chapter Eight
The experiment with confirmation checks in sections H and Q in 2012
Chapter Nine
Conclusions and discussion
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