Household Net Worth or Wealth

Is there any kind of dataset on the distribution of household net worth or wealth over time? If not, anything related like home equity, assets, or debt? I’m aware of wages/income data, but have had trouble finding anything related to stocks rather than flows.

The CPS ASEC contains a number of variables that you may find useful:

  • INCINT measures income from interest on saving accounts, certificates of deposit, money market funds, bonds, treasury notes, IRAs, and/or other investments which paid interest.
  • INCRENT measures income from rent, estates, trusts, and royalties.
  • The comparability tab of the INCTOT variable lists all the income variables that go into the INCTOT variable. This will show you all the sources of income you can identify, such as INCRENT and INCINT.
  • OWNERSHP is a variable for ownership of the dwelling.
  • PROPTAX is an imputed variable estimating the annual property taxes paid by the household in the previous calendar year. You may be able to glean information on the value of owned property using PROPTAX in combination with OWNERSHP.
  • CAPGAIN is an imputed variable estimating the pre-tax capital gain accrued by an individual or tax-filing unit.

The CPS Un(der)banked Supplement includes household-level questions about banking and lending.

Please let me know if you are interested in data collections other than the CPS, such as IPUMS USA (Census and American Community Survey data), and I can look into options for those data as well. For example, the variable VALUEH in IPUMS USA measures home value.

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