The long and short of asking questions about income, wealth, and labor supply

Economic characteristics of households are an important component of their socioeconomic environment. However, they are often given short shrift in surveys because survey designers believe that other measures of socioeconomic status (e.g., education) render them redundant, respondents will not answer such questions truthfully, and they may lead some potential respondents to drop out of the survey altogether. We argue that the conventional wisdom regarding survey questions on economic characteristics is wrong. We explain the conceptual distinctions among various economic measures, summarize survey methods that maximize data quality, and present recommendations of specific sets of questions that gather the needed data. (C) 2001 Academic Press.