1983-89 Panel Survey of Consumer Finances

SCF98 homepage at the Board of Governors, Federal Reserve System

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

Questionnaire (PDF).

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 90 Mb RAM to read this file, since it is 84 Mb on disk (4,669 variables, 4,437 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/89p/scxf89px.dta

SCF89p segment files

The original dataset has been divided into three segments for Stata use to cope with the 2048-variable limit on Stata datafiles. The SCF variable x1, case ID, has been placed in each segment of the data to facilitate merging. Each segment has 4,437 cases.

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

. use http://econ.bc.edu/scf/89p/p89p?.dta
where ?=(1,2,3). Be warned that these files are, respectively, 15 Mb, 13 Mb, and 9 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 5,604 variables:

How do I work with these segment files in Stata?

The downloadable SAS version is accessible from scf89px.xpt.gz, (4Mb, gzipped SAS Transport file).

Revised: 19 July 2002