tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830084253401570472.post7566078067159807805..comments2024-03-28T09:22:36.967+13:00Comments on Offsetting Behaviour: Wealth inequalityEric Cramptonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15831696523324469713noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830084253401570472.post-8672911322170201172017-05-09T12:54:15.917+12:002017-05-09T12:54:15.917+12:00Ah ok. No, obviously that can't be the case. B...Ah ok. No, obviously that can't be the case. But I find it bizarre that that result could be coming from survey data. There's no way people can be *reporting* those kind of numbers, or anything close to them. It might be that they're imputing a lot of missing values (either on the asset or debt side), and something is going wrong with the conditioning information for Decile 1.Jameshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07995395711510222406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830084253401570472.post-13257347867188740792017-05-09T09:20:47.917+12:002017-05-09T09:20:47.917+12:00I encountered the 'housing debt >> housi...I encountered the 'housing debt >> housing assets' problem in the latest Stats survey rather than SoFIE, and there it was (partially) that Stats was pulling in housing valuations that were old and merging in data on mortgage debt that was up to date , but there were also some problems around use of trusts where the kid from a richer family could be helping to pay the mortgage on a house he lives in that's held by the family trust and so his mortgage debt got recorded but the asset didn't - although that seems less likely to be a Decile 1 issue. In SoFIE, I don't know what the problem is. But there's no way that Decile 1 households, in the aggregate, have three times as much housing debt as they have housing assets. Eric Cramptonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15831696523324469713noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830084253401570472.post-16891515750137678552017-05-09T01:06:31.323+12:002017-05-09T01:06:31.323+12:00Thank for this Eric. Some of those pitfalls are su...Thank for this Eric. Some of those pitfalls are super useful to read about, as I was thinking of using the SOFIE data at some point. <br /><br />Do you know how it's possible that the data messes up the assets vs. liabilities for housing? I thought SOFIE was a survey, so who are these people massively over-reporting their debts? And why are different variables collected across different time periods? (Or is that part of their paper referring to a summary from Stats data, not SOFIE?) <br /><br />RE: international comparisons and retirement assets. I'm not sure that will make a big difference for, say, NZ-US comparisons. In the SCF, for example, 401K/IRA accounts are a really small proportion of total wealth. And a lot of authors writing about that survey explicitly leave these assets out of inequality calculations (sometimes they'll add them back in as income for retirees, which I think makes sense). <br />Jameshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07995395711510222406noreply@blogger.com