Assembling a real-financial micro-dataset for Canadian households

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. Our 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 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. The dataset covers the period 1999 till 2005 and contains roughly 11,000 observations (households) for each year. We plan to use these combined data to test key real-financial linkages (like those between house prices, debt and household expenditures) for the Canadian household sector.