Validation of Consumer Financial Characteristics: Common Stock

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Abstract
This study of the accuracy with which people report holdings of common stock was carried out by the Bureau of the Census with institutional cooperation as a sequel to the Federal Reserve Board Survey of Financial Characteristics (SFC) of 1963 using the same interviewers and identical field and data processing procedures. The results indicate substantial nonreporting of stock ownership, which represents a major source of bias. Nonresponse is positively related to economic status, and holdings reported by the respondents were less than those of the nonrespondents. The size distributions of stock holdings are biased. Perhaps most important, estimates of variances and of confidence intervals computed by the usual standard error formulas are invalid as applied to mean holdings of the total population.

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