User Guide

This document is about the technical details of the methodology used by the U.S. Department of Labor's Employee Benefits Security Administration to spread the assets held in Direct Filing Entities (DFEs) into their underlying financial asset categories. It explains the data selection and editing process, the algebraic approach to disentangling DFE cross-ownership, and the application of this methodology to both DFEs and private pension plans to produce a comprehensive "spread allocation" of pension assets.