Bank of Italy Survey of Households Income and Wealth

Since the late 70s Bank of Italy collects and distributes microdata on Italian families: the Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW). You can freely download the data from Historical (1977-2004) and Annual (1989-2004) archives directly from Bank of Italy web site at this link.

Starting in 1989 a panel component has been added to the survey: a subsample of households is interviewed repeatedly over the years. For various applications it is useful to construct a personal identification number that is constant across all sweeps (from 1989 to 2004) for each individual. Such an identification number is not provided in the original data, where one can only find a family number (NQUEST), a progressive number of family members (NORD) and the progressive number of the same family member in the previous sweep of the survey (NORDP).

The Stata file that can be downloaded here contains a fixed personal identification number for all individuals in the 8 sweeps of data (1989, 1991, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004) named id, together with the already existing family and member identification numbers in each sweep (NQUEST, NORD).

As the Bank of Italy also acknowledges (see this document), there are several incoherencies in the panel subsample of the survey. We have thus created an additional variable (INCOER) which takes value 1 if the observation in that particular year is incoherent with its counterpart from the previous sweep, i.e. if the individual appear to have changed sex (SEX) or year of birth (ANASC) or if its NORDP refers to a household member that was not present in the previous sweep.
Two more additional variables appear in this file: T indicates the number of times the person has been interviewed and PRESENT indicates whether the individual was present in the survey in that particular year. This variable can be used to select only individuals in the panel subsample (choose only PRESENT==1).

Here you can download the data file containing the variables (idbankitalia.dta) described above as well as the do-file used (panelid.do) to produce it. A short document with instructions about how to use the do-file is also available (readme.pdf).

We made every effort to avoid any possible mistake in these computer codes. However, please inform us if you experience any malfunctioning. We are sure that these tools can be improved with the cooperation of everyone.

Credits: these computer codes have been developed by Simona Baldi and Michele Pellizzari.