DWAS Annual Productive Ownership Estimate, Version 0.1

The DWAS Annual Productive Ownership Estimate (Annual Estimate) provides annual household-level estimates of the distribution of productive ownership in the United States for 2013–2024. It is part of the measurement architecture of the Democratic Wealth Accountability System (DWAS). The Annual Estimate was developed to provide distributional information for years in which the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) benchmark is unavailable. It uses public-use Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) household data and a frozen measurement architecture designed to approximate the DWAS productive-ownership concept while preserving a household-level distribution. Measurement role The Annual Estimate occupies a distinct position in the DWAS evidentiary hierarchy: SCF Benchmark → SCF Proxy → Annual Estimate → Quarterly Concentration Estimate (QCE) SCF benchmark measurements remain authoritative in SCF years. The Annual Estimate does not replace or revise those benchmarks. Its purpose is to provide annual evidence between benchmark observations and to make annual distributional structure observable at substantially greater frequency than the triennial SCF permits. Earlier development materials referred to this methodology as the DWAS Annual Productive Ownership Proxy. The public-facing name has been changed to DWAS Annual Productive Ownership Estimate to distinguish it clearly from the separate SCF Productive Ownership Proxy. This is a nomenclature clarification and does not constitute a methodological revision. Historical computational and provenance artifacts retain their original filenames where necessary to preserve traceability. Measurement outputs Because the method preserves a household-level productive-ownership distribution, the Annual Estimate supports estimation and analysis of: g, the ownership-exclusion parameter representing the weighted share of households with no positive productive ownership; α, the concentration parameter fitted to the positive-ownership population; standardized ownership shares, including major distributional groups and upper-tail shares; the empirical cumulative productive-ownership curve C(p); and residual deformation D(p), measuring departures of the empirical distribution from the fitted two-parameter reference form. This distinguishes the Annual Estimate from the DWAS Quarterly Concentration Estimate, which provides a higher-frequency estimate of α but does not recover g, ownership shares, or residual distributional structure. Validation and evidentiary status Version 0.1 is a frozen prospective methodology. Its bridge rules, fitting procedures, validation architecture, and evidentiary classifications were fixed without retrospective tuning to improve particular annual results. Validation against overlapping SCF observations evaluates more than agreement in fitted parameters. It also examines ownership shares and residual structure so that agreement in g or α cannot conceal substantively different household distributions. Annual observations are assigned evidentiary statuses reflecting data quality and methodological comparability. These classifications are retained in the deposited results and should be considered when interpreting individual years. In years for which an authoritative SCF benchmark exists, the SCF benchmark takes precedence over the Annual Estimate. Computational reproducibility This deposit includes the frozen analytical implementation, canonical bridge configuration, final reconciled validation materials, annual results for 2013–2024, residual curves, documentation, provenance records, and cryptographic manifests. The preserved computational implementation reproduces the frozen analytical calculations from standardized household extracts onward. Several temporary scripts originally used during raw SIPP extraction and development were not retained byte-for-byte. They have not been reconstructed and presented as original code. The archive therefore documents this limitation explicitly rather than claiming a fully preserved raw-SIPP-to-final-output execution chain. Historical and candidate materials necessary to understand the development and reconciliation of the frozen method are separated from governing publication artifacts so that computational provenance can be preserved without creating ambiguity about which files constitute Version 0.1. Relationship to other DWAS measurement products The Annual Estimate is one component of a broader DWAS measurement system. The SCF Productive Ownership Benchmark provides the authoritative household-level benchmark; the SCF Productive Ownership Proxy provides a standardized proxy construction using SCF extract data; the Annual Productive Ownership Estimate supplies annual household-distribution estimates using SIPP; and the Quarterly Concentration Estimate supplies higher-frequency concentration information where the available data support a narrower measurement. Together these products are intended to distinguish clearly between benchmark measurement, proxy construction, annual estimation, and higher-frequency estimation rather than treating estimates of different evidentiary strength as interchangeable observations. Citation and version Version: 0.1Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21968606 Version 0.1 should be cited when using the Annual Estimate methodology, its 2013–2024 annual results, its residual-distribution outputs, or its associated computational implementation.