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680 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 7 (2018)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0680 and id is 1 raw text is: Preface
By
KAREN PENCE

Individuals routinely have incomplete infor-
mation about the consequences of major life
decisions. What are the long-term implications
for health, wealth, and well-being, for example,
of choices about education, labor force partici-
pation, marriage, or childbearing? Policy-
makers face similar information gaps when
deciding which policy interventions will be the
best use of scarce public dollars.
One route to remedying these information
gaps is studying the life trajectories of other
individuals. To draw robust and reliable conclu-
sions from these life trajectories, however,
these data must be collected and analyzed in a
careful, methodological, and systematic way.
And the data designers must have both fore-
sight and patience: the foresight to design a
survey that will work, and the patience to watch
that survey design play out over time.
Fifty years ago, Jim Morgan, an economist at
the Institute for Social Research at the
University of Michigan, had that vision. He was
asked by the Office of Economic Opportunity
to take on a survey to evaluate the effectiveness
of the War on Poverty. He realized that such a
survey would need to sample the entire U.S.
population to fully capture the dynamics of how
households enter and leave poverty. He also
realized that the survey would remain repre-
sentative over time of the U.S. population if it
included the children, grandchildren, and fur-
ther descendants of the original sample mem-
bers. These two insights are the underpinnings
of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID).
Karen Pence is an assistant director in the Division of
Research and Statistics at the Board of Governors of
the Federal Reserve System. She has served as chair of the
Board of Overseers of the PSID since 2017 and as a
member of the Board since 2014. Her research focuses
on household financial decisions and on the instilulions
that extend credit to consumers.
Correspondence: Karen. Pence@FRB.GOV
DOI: 10.1177/0002716218802752

ANNALS, AAPSS, 680, November 2018

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