Michael Hurd

This paper uses international micro-data sets collected over recent years to investigate whether public pensions displace private savings.

In this paper, we report on a supplemental survey to the Health and Retirement Study that took up this challenge. We discuss issues that arise when designing a survey module to collect spending data with strict time constraints, describe how the implementation in the Consumption and Activities Mail Survey (CAMS) played out, and elicit anomalies that more detailed analysis of data quality revealed. We report how we addressed some of these anomalies in subsequent waves of CAMS.