Affiliations: [a] RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, USA | [b] University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Erik Meijer, Center for Economic and Social Research, University of Southern California, 635 Downey Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089-3332, USA. Tel.: +1 213 821 2788; E-mail: erik.meijer@usc.edu.
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.
