Comparing Register and Survey Wealth Data

Abstract

Survey measures of wealth are error prone with a relatively large error variance. The errors are not uncorrelated with the true values but tend to have a negative correlation, which implies that wealthy people tend to underreport and less wealthy to over report. There is no general tendency of survey data to underestimate mean wealth with the exception of the last percentile. The underestimate of the wealth of the very rich is however not due to underreporting but rather to selective nonresponse. Using simple models this paper discusses consequences of error prone wealth data.