TY - CHAP T1 - Household Wealth of the Elderly under Alternative Imputation Procedures T2 - Inquiries in the economics of aging Y1 - 1998 A1 - Hoynes, Hilary A1 - Michael D Hurd A1 - Chand, Harish ED - David A Wise KW - Consumption and Savings KW - Demographics KW - Income KW - Net Worth and Assets KW - Retirement Planning and Satisfaction AB - Although many reach retirement with few resources except housing equity and a claim to social security and Medicare, financial wealth, nonetheless, makes an important contribution to the economic status of many of the elderly. Most of our up-to-date information about the wealth of the elderly is based on the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), which sometimes adds an asset module to its core survey. As in many surveys of assets, the rate of missing data on individual asset items is high, about 30 to 40 percent among those with the asset. This raises the issue of the reliability of SIPP wealth measures because respondents who refuse or are unable to give a value to an asset item may not be representative of the population. Indeed, in the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) it is clear that asset data are not missing at random. Through the use of bracketing methods, which we will discuss below, the HRS was able to reduce the rate of missing asset data substantially, and the data that were added in this way increased mean wealth in the HRS by about 40 percent (Smith 1995). Furthermore, because the additional data increased the mean so much, they undoubtedly increased measures of wealth inequality. JF - Inquiries in the economics of aging PB - University of Chicago Press CY - Chicago and London UR - https://www.nber.org/chapters/c7088 IS - NBER Project Report series N1 - ProCite field[3]: U CA, Berkeley and NBER; SUNY, Stony Brook, RAND, and NBER; U CA, Berkeley U4 - Economics of the Elderly/Retirement/Retirement Policies/Personal Income and Wealth Distribution/Elderly/Wealth JO - Household Wealth of the Elderly under Alternative Imputation Procedures ER -