Identifying couples in administrative data

We develop a new method for identifying married couples in administrative data. Using address and name data from the universe of employment records in Germany we find around 3.3 Mio. pairs of individuals who are living at the same location, have a matching last name and are less than 15 years apart in age. We show supporting evidence that around 89 to 94% of these pairs are indeed married couples and provide careful consistency checks. Using information from the German Microcensus, we show that our method identifies about 17% of all married couples in Germany and about 35% of couples where both spouses are in social security covered jobs or unemployed. In ongoing work this couple identifier will be made available to the research community and users for the IAB administrative data. Our method thus opens the door for household level analyses benefiting from the precision and very large number of observations available in administrative data.