The Current State of U.S. Household Balance Sheets
Jake Krimmel, Kevin Moore, John Sabelhaus
,
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review
September
2013
krimmel et al frb st louis 2013.pdf601.36 KB
Abstract
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is responsible for two of the most widely used datasets containing information about U.S. household balance sheets: the quarterly macro-level Financial Accounts of the United States (FA, formerly known as the Flow of Funds Accounts) and the triennial microlevel Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). The FA is very timely, but the data can be used only to describe the household sector as a whole. The SCF provides the micro-level detail needed to capture heterogeneity in household finances, but the data are available only with a long lag.