Affiliations: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Ret.), Washington, DC 20551, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
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.