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Working Paper
Savings Versus Debt: The Effects of Survey Question Order on Consumers’ Reported Financial Priorities
Survey after survey indicates that building savings and reducing debt are among the top financial goals for many Americans. However, because of limited resources and inherent trade-offs, achieving these two goals can be challenging and often requires prioritizing one goal over the other. We conduct two survey experiments with national samples of U.S. adults to understand how individuals balance saving and paying off debt, while taking into account survey context and question effects that might influence self-reports of behaviors. Both studies find a significant question order effect, in which ...
Report
Why Some Americans Don’t Invest in the Stock Market
This report presents findings from the January 2025 LIFE Survey on stock market participation and explores the factors that discourage individuals from investing. We find that, among nonowners in the underrepresented groups, limited financial knowledge was reported as a major barrier to investing, significantly more often than nonowners from their demographic counterparts. Indeed, these group differences in subjective financial knowledge were reflected in an objective measure of financial literacy across the full sample, with individuals from underrepresented groups displaying lower levels of ...
Discussion Paper
How Well Do Survey Self-Reports Align with Administrative Data? The Case of U.S. Consumer Credit Records
This paper assesses how closely consumers’ self-reported credit and debt attributes (such as credit account ownership and balances) align with administrative credit bureau records for mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards. Understanding the contents of one’s credit report can be critical to consumers’ ability to obtain affordable credit and to their ability to manage their finances generally. Surveys often ask respondents to report the types and amounts of credit they have, but it is often difficult or impossible to determine if the reported information is accurate. In this paper, we ...