Affiliations: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Ret.), Washington, DC 20551, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract: As is the case in most other government surveys, the Survey of Consumer
Finances (SCF) makes strenuous efforts to maintain response rates. These
efforts are quite costly. The argument for pursuing the relatively difficult
``late'' cases is two-fold: First, sample size is important for more
efficient estimation. Second, there is an implicit assumption that higher
response rates lessen the possibilities of bias. The former argument is
straightforward, but the latter is less so. This paper investigates the
information contained in the later observations of the SCF. The data
presented here suggest that there are differences in some of the economic
and other characteristics of respondents and nonrespondents, and that these
differences are present in a weaker form in the contrast between the cases
that are early and those that are late. However, for general purposes, the
differences between the early and late cases are not dependably strong.
Because nonresponse is affected both by respondent-specific characteristics
and management decisions about the deployment of interviewers, it unlikely
that we can make substantial progress without separating these effects.