Multiple imputation in the Survey of Consumer Finances

Abstract

The Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) focuses intensely on the details of households' finances. Owing to the perceived sensitivity of this topic to some people and the difficulty of answering some questions, unit and item nonresponse rates in the SCF are substantial. The FRITZ Multiple imputation(MI) routine developed for the SCF has provided a means of providing a public data set that is more informative overall than anything that could be constructed with the data available to the public while also providing a more honest picture of the limits of our knowledge about the missing data. MI also plays a key role in the SCF in disclosure limitation as a tool for a limited form of data simulation in the public version of the data. This paper reviews the implementation of MI for the SCF and provides some empirical evidence on the performance of the FRITZ system.

Keywords

Item nonresponse multiple imputation

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