ABSTRACT
Following the downfall of Communism, a new spectre is now haunting social scientists-the spectre of household panel surveys. Not content with cross-sectional surveys (i.e. surveys that collect information from different individuals or households at a single point in time), academic groups and national statistical offices have launched household panel surveys in most European countries as well as in North America. Panel surveys, which periodically gather economic and demographic information about the same people over a number of years, have the potential to provide much richer information about economic and demographic behaviour. But they also appear to have voracious appetites for severely constrained resources from national science foundation budgets and may suffer from a number of technical problems as well. Under what conditions, if any, are household panels worth the effort and expense?
