Data Watch: The Panel Study of Income Dynamics

By collecting annual economic and demographic information from a large and representative sample of U.S. households for over a quarter century, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics has compiled a remarkably useful set of microdata. This article describes the PSID and how its unique longitudinal and, in some cases, intergenerational features have been used for studies of intertemporal models of labor supply; wages, employment, and job tenure; consumption; poverty dynamics; extended-family behavior; and the intergenerational transmission of economic status.