Survey of Household Economics and Decision Making

Intro and Overview

The Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) measures the economic well-being of US households and identifies potential risks to finances. Topics include credit access, savings, retirement, economic fragility, and educational loans. The survey began in 2013 and the most recent full survey was fielded in October of 2019. A limited supplement was fielded in April of 2020 to assess the impact of of the COVID-19 economic shutdown. The 2019 survey included over 12,000 adults. These data are available now to researchers.

Tips for Getting Started

Begin by reading the Report on Economic Well-Being Links to an external site. for the survey year you intend to use. Survey descriptions are included in each report.

Codebooks and data downloads are available here. Links to an external site.

Key Advantages

Detailed information about financial well-being.
Recency. Data from April 2020 are already available.
Includes information about retirement savings.

Key Disadvantages

Cross-sectional
Small sample sizes but low-income over samples and minority sub samples help to facilitate research of these groups.

Papers Using these Data

FED research papers based on these data are available here. Links to an external site.

Additional papers include:

Chen, A. (2019). Why are so many households unable to cover a $400 unexpected expense?”. Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, 19(11), 1-10.

Tach, L. M. (2016, November). Income Volatility Among the Economically Disadvantaged. In 2016 Fall Conference: The Role of Research in Making Government More Effective. Appam.

DeVaney, S. A. (2016). Financial issues of older adults. In Handbook of consumer finance research (pp. 155-166). Springer, Cham.