1983-89 Panel Survey of Consumer Finances

Survey Data

Full Public Data Set: SAS format
The panel survey data are available in two formats. The first set of data are made available in two types of transport file. These files may be used with the current versions of SAS. (Help is available for importing these files as SAS datasets.) One version is created using PROC CPORT; this is the smaller of the two files. The second one is created using PROC COPY with the EXPORT option; this file may be particularly convenient for users who do not have access to SAS, but who do have some means of translating the dataset to another form using a software package that does not support CPORT files. Additionally, the panel survey data set is available as a Stata data set. All of these types of files are provided in compressed form as WINZIP files. (See PKWARE website for software to uncompress WINZIP files.)

The panel respondents are a subset of the participants in the 1983 SCF who were also interviewed as a part of the 1989 SCF. As described in more detail in the codebook, the data here are a specially processed version of the data from the two interviews. For reasons noted in the codebook, this file does not incorporate data from the 1986 wave of the panel.

Missing data have been imputed three times with a multiple imputation technique. The information is stored in three separate and internally coherent imputation replicates (implicates). Thus, for the 1,479 families interviewed for the survey, there are 4,437 records in the data set. The codebook provides more detail on the structure of the data set.

Survey data: CPORT version ()
Survey data: COPY/EXPORT version ()
Last updated March 2, 2007

Full Public Data Set: Stata format
A second version of the panel survey data is given as a Stata data set. Because the data set contains approximately 4700 variables, users will need to use Stata SE if they wish to impute all the variables. Users of standard Stata will need to specify a subset of variables when using the data set.

WARNING: Some browser versions will download these files in unzipped form; the resulting Stata file will require 28.5 MB of disk space.
Survey data: Stata ()
Last updated March 2, 2007

Full Public Data Set: ASCII format
A third version of the full public data set is given in ASCII format. The variables included have exactly the same values as those in the SAS and Stata data sets. The layout of the variables is given by a format file, which is provided in Excel and tab-delimited formats. Note that under certain operating systems the end of record marker will add one character to the record length listed in the format file.

WARNING: Some browser versions will download these files in unzipped form; the resulting ASCII file will require 209 MB of disk space.
Main survey data: ASCII ()
Map of variables: Excel ()
Map of variables: Tab-delimited ()

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