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Finally, there is a concern that the homosexual couples analyzed here may not be same-sex
households. The Census identifies same-sex partners by their cohabiting relationship with an
unmarried individual of the same gender who records his/her “relationship to household head” as
“unmarried partner”. Unfortunately, the 2000 Census modified the relationship to head from
“spouse” to “unmarried partner”, and/or the marital status from married to unmarried, for couples
with both mates of the same sex, without signaling the allocated values in the flag variable of
relationship to head. As documented in Black et al. (2006), this procedure leads to consider several
heterosexual married couples as same-sex couples who wrongly reported their sex or relationship to
head. To avoid misclassifying heterosexual couples as homosexual ones, Black et al. (2006) and
Jepsen (2007) propose that individuals with imputed values for “marital status”, “sex”, and
“relationship to household head”, are excluded from the ‘homosexual’ samples, using the
corresponding “q” variables which flag allocated values. We follow this well-established procedure
to ensure that the same-sex couples under consideration constitute genuine homosexual
partnerships, rather than heterosexuals misreporting their gender or their relationship to head; in
addition homosexuals who misidentify themselves as married are also dropped (by year 2000, no
US state had legalized same-sex marriages). The risk that sentimentally un-related individuals
voluntarily identify themselves as unmarried partners (rather than roommates) is minimal, given the
stigma attached to homosexuality. However, all these instances of misreporting would work against
our findings of significantly higher savings in same-sex couples, as the presence of heterosexual
families in our homosexual sample would lead to a statistically insignificant differential. Older
homosexuals may be more reluctant to identify themselves as such, so that our same-sex couples
may be a subsample of the actual couples in the population. However, there is no reason to think
that declaring to the Census that one is in a homosexual partnership indicate anything about the
nature of household savings. Finally, in the Census sexual orientation is inferred from self-reported
data and underreporting of homosexual status may be correlated with demographic characteristics
such as education and income. At any rate, there is no reason to assume that misreporting is more
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