1998 Survey of Consumer Finances

SCF98 homepage at the Board of Governors, Federal Reserve System

Downloadable Codebook: updated by FRB 1 March 2001; most easily searched with BBEdit or BBEdit Lite

Federal Reserve Bulletin article (PDF) describing SCF'98

Questionnaire-Style Summary of the 1998 SCF CAPI Instrument (PDF). This document is based on the questionnaire for the 1992 SCF, the last of the surveys for which a paper questionnaire was used. The questionnaire has been altered to include changes to the instrument since 1992, and each variable in the final dataset has been labeled with its corresponding SCF X-variable number.

Using the data in Stata

You have two options for accessing this dataset with Stata. If you have access to Stata/SE (Special Edition) and sufficient RAM, you can access the single file listed below. You need at least 500 Mb RAM to read this file, since it is 445 Mb on disk (5,155 variables, 21,525 observations). Stata/SE is available on the Unix systems econ.bc.edu, ecsa200.bc.edu, and goanna.bc.edu, and may be acquired for desktop systems.

If you do not have access to Stata/SE and/or do not have the needed RAM, you may use the 'segment files' listed below, which break up the single file into chunks that may be used with standard Intercooled Stata with a smaller RAM allocation. See the link 'How do I work with these segment files in Stata?' for guidance.

To access the single file:

. use http://econ.bc.edu/scf/98/scf98x.dta

SCF98 segment files

The original dataset has also been divided into three segments for Stata use to cope with the 2048-variable limit on Stata datafiles. The SCF variable y1, public-use family ID, has been placed in each segment of the data to facilitate merging. Each segment has 21,525 cases.

They are accessible over the web (within the BC network) via: 

. use http://econ.bc.edu/scf/98/scf98-?.dta

where ?=(1,2,3). Be warned that these files are, respectively, 95 Mb, 72 Mb, and 46 Mb, and Stata must be given at least as much RAM as the file size to read the files. Use of Stat/Transfer to extract a subset of the data is highly recommended.

The three segments were constructed as follows from the original SAS CPORT file, which contains 5,155 variables and 21,525 observations:

How do I work with these segment files in Stata?

Using the data in SAS

The downloadable SAS version is accessible from scf98x.xpt.gz, (15Mb, gzipped SAS Transport file).

Revised: 18 July 2002