Survey Estimates of Wealth - Mathematica Policy Research

in households with two other families, about one in three would include the household head, and
so on.
If a sample family in a household with at least one other family reported owning (or buying)
its home, we treated it as including the household head. Conversely, if a sample family in a
household with at least one other family reported that it neither owned nor rented, and the
government did not pay the rent, we treated such a family as not including the household head.
This left families that reported paying rent, which is an ambiguous status because multiple
families could split the rent payments, and there was no variable on the file to indicate that a
sample family was the sole payer of rent. 13
To deal with this residual group, we assigned
families to headship status based on family size and a variable indicating whether or not the
family reported having received financial assistance from other family members in 1997.
Reasoning that larger families were more likely to include the household head, but not knowing
the size of any family besides the sample family, we assigned sample families of size one to nonheadship
status, and we assigned sample families of size two or greater to headship status
providing that they did not report receiving financial assistance from other family members.
While this strategy has an obvious bias against single-person families among renters, it yielded
about the right proportion of sample families with heads among sample families in households
with one or more other families.
Finally, for the sample families that we classified as including the household head, we
rescaled the 1999 family weights so that they summed to the March 1999 CPS estimate of total
households, or nearly 103.9 million. This represented an increase of 4.8 percent in the family
13 In such cases the Census Bureau would assign headship to the person whose name was on the lease.
20