Assembling a real-financial micro-dataset for Canadian households

Abstract

The lack of consolidated Canadian micro data on household balance sheets and expenditures has been an important impediment to empirical research into real-financial linkages in the Canadian household sector. My paper attempts to fill this data gap by merging household balance sheet data from the Canadian Financial Monitor survey with household expenditure data from the Canadian Survey of Household Spending. The merge process uses a categorical matching framework aimed at preserving the heterogeneity in the underlying datasets. The resulting combined dataset is a novel source of Canadian micro data on household finances and spending patterns covering the period from 1999 to 2005, with roughly 11,000 observations (households) for each year.