The measurement of household wealth using survey data: An overview of the survey of consumer finances

Survey measurement of household wealth faces some inherent difficulties: respondents may not provide financial information, values of assets and liabilities can be hard to report accurately, and ordinary random samples contain too few wealthy households to represent the full distribution of wealth. The Survey of Consumer Finances has a number of special features intended to promote accurate estimation of household wealth. This paper provides an overview of the SCF, including the sample design, response rates, information collected, and data quality and imputation.