Cross-Wave Prospective Social Security Benefit Wealth Measures of Pre-Retirees Waves 10 and 13

This release of the Prospective Social Security Wealth Measures of Pre-Retirees data set consists of respondent-level Social Security benefit wealth estimates constructed from the employment section of the 2010 and 2016 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) (waves 10 and 13) and the restricted Social Security Administration (SSA) summary earnings and benefits files. This file replaces the previous version of this data product, "Prospective Social Security Wealth Measures of Pre-Retirees, Wave 10", since wave 10 measures are also incorporated in this wave 13 file.

In this public use file, we calculate wealth only for individuals who have not yet retired. Each individual is uniquely identified by the concatenation of the household ID and the person number, HHID and PN.

Note that the naming convention of S* (spouse) variables are different from those in the longitudinal RAND-HRS data file. Due to the nature of spousal and survival benefits, we use S* variables to capture "the amount of spousal/survival benefit a respondent is entitled to," rather than "the amount of benefit that the respondent's spouse is entitled to."