17.11.2014 Views

Survey Estimates of Wealth - Mathematica Policy Research

Survey Estimates of Wealth - Mathematica Policy Research

Survey Estimates of Wealth - Mathematica Policy Research

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

Create successful ePaper yourself

Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.

<strong>of</strong> SIPP married couple families to more closely match the SCF and the PSID. With our<br />

revision, the husband is always the family head. For unmarried partners, however, the partner<br />

identified as householder by the Census Bureau remains the family head regardless <strong>of</strong> sex.<br />

With this change we would expect the SCF and SIPP families to agree fairly closely on the<br />

characteristics <strong>of</strong> the household head. We would also expect that our restriction <strong>of</strong> the PSID<br />

sample to quasi-householder families resulted in close agreement between the characteristics <strong>of</strong><br />

the PSID family heads and the SCF and SIPP household heads. These expectations were largely<br />

borne out. While the SIPP families have noticeably fewer heads under 30 and more between the<br />

ages <strong>of</strong> 30 and 65, the PSID families match the SCF age distribution very closely. 14<br />

The smaller<br />

proportion <strong>of</strong> young family heads in the SIPP reflects differences in how the two surveys<br />

determine headship rather than anything in our creation <strong>of</strong> SCF-like families. The SIPP and SCF<br />

distributions by race and Hispanic origin match fairly closely, but comparable data from the<br />

PSID were not available. The SCF and PSID agree closely on the gender <strong>of</strong> the head while the<br />

SIPP has somewhat more female heads—perhaps the result <strong>of</strong> our not assigning the headship <strong>of</strong><br />

unmarried couple families to the male in every case.<br />

The three surveys diverge markedly with respect to the frequency <strong>of</strong> families <strong>of</strong> size one,<br />

two, three, and four. The modal family size among SIPP families is one (33.5 percent) but two<br />

among the SCF and PSID families (33.0 and 34.1 percent, respectively). The PSID has the<br />

fewest families <strong>of</strong> size one and the most at sizes three and four, which may reflect our method <strong>of</strong><br />

identifying quasi-householder families when the family circumstances were ambiguous.<br />

14 Among all PSID families, 15.7 percent have a head under age 30, so our selection <strong>of</strong> quasi-household<br />

families did indeed move the age distribution closer to that <strong>of</strong> both the SCF and the SIPP.<br />

22

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!